I thought maybe I would try to unlayer a small theme that seemed present in the novel that we really didn’t talk about to much. The maturity of the novel and everything about it. Overall the gender role switching is a main part of the novel, where males have these unseemingly feminine characteristics and Marla is rather masculine while herself is a female. The males are trying to be seen as masculine so they go to a fight club and beat each other up and blow up buildings and make soap. How mature is this? When you are little your mother always says fighting never solved anything so why is that the backbone of this story is so elementary.
The point I feel of the novel is to bring down capitalism to detroy things that have us set in history. While these are not topics 8 year olds talk about but if you generalize it and ask say an 8 year old how would they get back at someone/thing that has angered them I’m sure a response would be beat them up, or throw something at them, this always seems to be the case. So how mature are these men where they make explosives in a house and run around destroying things. Is there no better way?
Also the more humorous side of this maturity level found in the relationship between the narrator and Marla was actually touched upon in class. Butt-wipe being the main nickname for the two does not show that these characters are more than 10 years old. I actually quite enjoyed the suck ass use in the end of the book when Marla is mad at the narrator for hitting her. Which still I don’t get the gap of what happened there but along the same lines, when you are being raised males in general are taught never to hit a girl and what happens in the novel, Marla is hit, even though she is one of the more masculine characters. But all in all why is this book so full of impact, yet it is based on such childish and immature ways of going about things. Beating each other up for fun, blowing up apartments and making soap, does not scream maturity to me at all.
I agree on the fact that these men are trying to feel like men by Fight Club and Project Mayhem but that is immature to blow things up and beat people up. Marla is crazy but she seems more mature than the other men.
I understand your question Zena, but the novel’s lack of maturity, as you describe it, makes a great deal of sense when I consider Esther’s point.
If Freud would argue that the narrator, as a super ego, is subject to social pressures, he becomes a product of capitalism. His wants and needs are dictated by influential marketing schemes and hard sells. As the narrator says:
(Please pardon the nightmare of my previous post’s format. Trying again.)
I understand your question Zena, but the novel’s lack of maturity, as you describe it, makes a great deal of sense when I consider Esther’s point.
If Freud would argue that the narrator, as a super ego, is subject to social pressures, he becomes a product of capitalism. His wants and needs are dictated by influential marketing schemes and hard sells. As the narrator says:
That said, since the narrator (and his friends) can no longer identify human desire, he must return to life as it was prior to capitalist brainwashing to learn what he truly wants to do before he dies.
Tyler is the narrator’s inner child or “id,” free from social requisites and prohibitions. This part of the personality is representative purely of human want and desire whether it’s sport sex, revenge via explosives and name calling, or playing dangerous pranks on the powerful. He becomes the vehicle by which the narrator learns what his true wants are. With “Tyler dogma” coming not just from Tyler but from all his worker bees, the narrator must decide:
Childish tactics like this game of chicken are not simply immature. They reveal what lies beneath societal masking, returning to the point in which life was more than plugging into a job to buy shit, perpetuating the mind-numbing cycle of adulthood.
[...] 2007.09.29 To Hannah on Fight Club, the book 2007.09.29 To Esther on Jameson 2007.10.04 To Zena on Fight Club, the book 2007.10.04 To Tammy on Fight Club, the book 2007.10.15 To Aliya on [...]