This was crazy. Quite different from everything I’ve ever read, but also quite deep. It’s all written in the first person, so we see and know only what the protagonist sees and knows. Is there any other character in book history without a name? Because the name of this one is never mentioned.
Anyway, overall it feels totally crazy because, well, the protagonist ‘has problems’, but it also has the concept of the lower people rebelling on the higher people which made me think of The time machine, and it has the concept of ‘one strong mind leads, they follow and the group becomes unstoppable’ which made me think of the movie Die welle, it’s not like that but it’s an example.
The protagonist (HE) has insomnia. The doctor has no solution, and has no sympathy I’d say, since he tells HIM to go and see what real pain is. HE does, and for two years he keeps going to various support groups, more or less every day, where there are people suffering from serious diseases, and by serious I mean terminal (many things are serious, but the people in this groups are often terminal). He pretends to be one of them, he follows seriously everything they do, if they meditate he meditates and so on, and then they cry in each other arms, and HE finds it useful, necessary, to let go like that, and he sort of sleeps now.
To keep the story short, for now, he meets a woman that like him does not belong there, and everything falls apart because he can’t cry or let go with her there who knows that he’s a fake.
Back from the airport one day, his apartment is destroyed, something exploded inside, so he has nothing and nowhere to go and he calls Tyler Durden, a guy he recently met, to ask if he can stay with him, if Tyler can save him. HE goes to live with Tyler, and Tyler is quite a peculiar character. He does various jobs, but he’s also an anarchist who pees in rich people’s food when he’s a waiter and many other little things like that, and who makes money by making soap at home using human fat (after people go to plastic surgeons to have it removed). Tyler insisted they hit each other on their first night together, and they do and find it liberating, so Tyler starts his first fight club, where people fight each other for the sake of fighting until someone wants to stop, and now He feels better, very zen, nothing touches him anymore.
More and more people start attending these fight clubs, and Tyler also start Project Mayhem, where people are totally under his control and do everything he says, and Tyler sends them out to complete their ‘homework’, which can be to start a fire, cause trouble, fight someone, or whatever.
Fight clubs start in other cities as well, and Tyler and his people threaten or castrate anyone who plans to close them.
At some point, Tyler disappears and HE starts asking around about him. Tyler made him promise he would never talk about him to others, but HE wants to find him and so he does ask.
Someone eventually tells him that HE is Tyler, that HE started it all, and he understands that Tyler is a separate, dangerous personality who shares his body.
He tries to stop the fight clubs, and so is also threatened with castration. His office blows up and his boss is killed, and HE knows Tyler did it. Tyler must be stopped so HE goes to a fight club to be killed after one fight too many, but he doesn’t, so he plans to let himself blow up when the ‘space monkeys’ (Tyler’s project people) plan to blow up a building. He also has a gun, in case something goes wrong, and it does so he shoots himself… but he put the gun in his mouth, and somehow he only makes a hole in his cheek or something, and is locked in a mental hospital or something, where there’s nothing he can do and other people keep the project going…
More in details:
—I’m not sure if Marla and others stopped the bomb in the building or who did, but it didn’t blow up, and Marla and the guys from the support groups were there to try and help him, they didn’t want him to shoot himself.
—Marla gets angry and says she called the police on him because she saw him shooting a man dead. HE says it was Tyler, because the man wanted to go against the fight clubs, and also that probably the police won’t arrive because many policemen are part of the fight club. This is when HE decides he has to kill Tyler.
—if fight clubs grew so much, it’s because many didn’t respect the first rule and did indeed talk about the fight club.
—there is no way to stop it, because part of Tyler’s rule is: no talking about it, and anyone who tries to stop it must be punished, including himself.
Now, I saw the movie before I read the book, so knowing already that they are the same person I noted how it was hinted here and there.
Everytime HE says “I know this because Tyler knows this”
HE says that HE wants Tyler, but Tyler wants Marla and Marla wants HIM - but she has sex with Tyler, but ‘looks at him as if she has sex with HIM’, and when she calls Tyler’s name and HE says Tyler’s not home, she thinks HE’s being mean, and when HE says “it was Tyler” she screams “what are you talking about?”
When HE asks a man if Tyler made up the new rules, the man “smiles and says, You know who makes up the rules”.
Bizarre thing is, at the end when HE turns against Tyler, it turns out that HE loves Marla too.
Without Tyler, his first wish is to die, HE feels helpless and hates his life.
HE hits himself at someone’s office to make it look like they beat him up, and “for no reason at all” this reminds him of the first time he fought Tyler.
HE finds it hard to believe that he is Tyler, because HE loves “everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts”, because Tyler is “funny and charming and forceful and independent and men look up to him and expect him to change their world”. So HE believes that when HE is asleep Tyler walks and talks using HIS body, and HE had no idea.
Tyler appeared when he started feeling trapped, he was tired, couldn’t sleep, felt like he wanted to die, he hated his life and was bored with his job and his flat with its pretty furniture and all the objects he had bought.
The Project has a Mischief Committee, and also Arson, Assault and Misinformation: it’s “Organized chaos. he Bureaucracy of Anarchy”.
The Project was invented (by Tyler) after HE could not relax any more, kept feeling terrible and not even smashing a pretty guy’s face helped at all. At this point, HE was feeling like “the crap and the slaves of history”, like HE wanted to destroy everything.
At this point, HE thinks Project Mayhem will save the world, stop humanity long enough for the world to recover, “Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world”, and “this was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and rightaway destruction of civilization.”
People HE has never seen start calling him Sir, everywhere he sees people with their faces beaten up or with their head totally shaved and HE knows they are part of the clubs and the Project.
Weird thing is, part of HIM liked his job, his flat, his boss even. But the other part that became Tyler clearly didn’t.
It’s not clear to me if HIS father left him when HE was a child or if HE never met him (because HE and Tyler have different version, not sure which one is correct). Anyway, both grew up without a father, without a model. HE is very affected by this (and doesn’t seem too care much at all about his mom honestly, as if only the father mattered).
— — — — Someone help me here, is it supposed to me a man thing or what, that these men hit each other very brutally, smashing everything they can of the other’s face and body, and yet as soon as the fight is over they are like best friends, and there’s never a bad thought for those who broke your teeth or dig a hole in your cheek or whatever… it doesn’t seem normal to me that there is never resentment for someone who beat you up so badly, these men are as happy about doing the beating as they are about getting beaten… how messed up is that? This is not a sport like Boxe or any other kind of combat sports, there are no rules and the damage is always pretty high.
— — I think that HE never killed anyone, but Tyler did, and so did all the other members of the Project.
Just a recap of the rules:
The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club
the second rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club
the third rule is only two guys to a fight
the fourth rule is one fight at a time
the fifth rule is no shoes, no shirts
the sixth rule is fights go on as long as they have to
the seventh rule is if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
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