Thematic essay

Fight Club

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club. There are no rules saying not to write about it.

Throughout the novel Fight Club there are many controversial themes hidden in the story by the author Chuck Palahnuik. One of the major themes that is consistently referred to throughout the novel is emasculation. The novel suggests that men in today's society are emasculated by their meaningless and superficial lives that they live, alongside everyone else in society. Fight club is these men's way to escape this lifeless life by making them feel pain and coming close to death, in hopes to rid themselves of this worthless feeling and help them discover who they truly are. The author does an excellent job of hinting at the idea of emasculation with the use of different literary devices and elements. By the end of the novel it becomes very clear to the reader that emasculation is a main premise of the story, and fight club is the men's escape from that world, even though it may have not been obvious while reading.

First things first, what made the men feel emasculated. The world the narrator lives in, is one that frowns upon acts of aggression and violence. Things that are considered to be manly. So much so that the narrator alongside all the men that join the fight club disassociate themselves with that side of their personality. It becomes very clear that this is how these men feel when the author writes “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (Page 50). The men in the story feel that they are forced to live in an unnatural and unfulfilling way because of the society they grew up and live in. This quote implies that the men are forced to ignore their masculinity and deal with things like emotions and feelings. Things that are considered to be feminin. This is exactly what fight club is for, to give men their masculinity back. Making them feel pain and bringing them close to death is how to make a man truly feel like a man again, because there is no room for estrogen when you are beating or are getting the crap beaten out of you by another man.

The author uses a metaphor to demonstrate the fact that these men are emasculated without referring to it directly when he writes, “You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood” (Page 51). This metaphor is first comparing the men to a loaf of white bread. The main inference drawn from this comparison is that these men are plain and lack their masculinity. There is nothing special or unique about them, just like white bread. There is nothing manly about them. They are plain men living plain lives in a world that doesn't allow them to be true men. This is the exact reason these men join fight club in the first place, they no longer want to be plain men living a plain life. They want their masculinity back. The second metaphor used in this quote is comparing the members of fight club to being carved out of wood. This comparison is saying that after being in fight club men transform from a loaf of white bread to a sculpture made of wood. This wooden sculpture represents the man that they are supposed to be. Just like a sculpture, they are carved with precision down to every little detail into the men that they are

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