Palahniuk didn’t write this book to be anything but pure entertainment...whatever label fans of this book (and movie) have given it over the years is a testament to the effect it has on it’s audience. At it’s very core it is a love story as tragic as any love story ever written. On the surface it’s a manifesto for the rebellion of the common man. It fails as a love story because you are not moved to tears at its conclusion. It fails as a revolutionary text because the recipe for rebellion it describes is completely inconsistent and a one way ticket to homelessness, prison, disfigurement, and/or death...not sacrifices one would readily make for a cause without understanding the higher purpose.
It achieves, however, a psychological pathology that turns Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on it’s head. All of us share a common attribute with regard to our brains...we all have a left side and a right side. In theory the level at which we are all schizophrenic is directly related to how closely the two sides of our brain communicate. In Julian Jayne’s monumental, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” one could attribute the residual evidence of split personality disorder to all of us as a leftover artifact of our brain’s evolution. This could mean there’s a Tyler Durden hiding in all of us...regardless of whether our personal Tyler Durden looks like Brad Pitt. I believe it’s this hidden side, the side from which Palahniuk blows us out of the water, that makes his novel, and this work, so important to us fans. Five stars for Fight Club.
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