Life Affirmation In Fight Club Essay

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Throughout Friedrich Nietzsche’s novel, On the Genealogy of Morals and the movie Fight Club, there are many parallels seen regarding an individual’s life-affirmation and their morals. To get a better understanding of many of Nietzsche’s philosophies described in his novel, one can take a look at the character’s interactions and personalities during the movie Fight Club. In this paper, the ideas of life-affirmation, übermensch, slave morality, master morality, and how the characters of Fight Club hold these concepts in their personalities will be discussed.
To give a basic synopsis of the movie Fight Club, it is about an insomniac salesman, also known as the Narrator, who uses support groups as an outlet to free himself from his insomnia and sorrows. This continues until he meets Tyler Durden, a man with many issues of his own, who soon becomes his mentor. After creating a fight club together, they use fighting as their new method of therapy. Along, the way the Narrator becomes closer to a woman named Marla Singer who has just as many issues as he does. Just as things begins to look up for the Narrator, his life and everything around him continuously become worse once again (Fincher, Fight …show more content…

Tyler states, “it’s only after we’ve lost everything that were free to do anything” (Fincher, Fight Club). Tyler wants the Narrator to know that he must feel pain and lose everything he has and loves in order to understand what he truly wants in his life. Tyler tells the Narrator that it is important for humans to embrace natural instincts. We also see life-affirmation when Tyler and the Narrator hold up the convenience store. They threaten the worker until he realizes what he really wants to do with his life. Overall, Tyler believes that unless we face death at least one time in our lives, we do not know what we truly want. Under Nietzsche’s notion of life-affirmation comes the concept of

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