Fight Club

1. “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche Fight Club

2. Themes • Anti-Consumerism • The basis for the entire book relies on rejecting material goods. The narrator talks about how he personally picked out his sofa, his china and his coffee table. These things served as a comfort to him. Once he made decisions about those, they became permanent parts of his life. It is a keeping up with the Joneses mentality that fuels consumerism. This idea that people must have certain possessions keeps them going and distracted by what is really going on. People in the lower ranks of society think that if they work hard, they can buy all these things as if the things define who they are. A major point in the book is that your things do not define who they are, instead they distract from who you really are. Tyler's idea is to free yourself from your possessions and then look at who you are when you have nothing. What are you made of then?

3. Themes • Reclaiming Masculinity • The narrator observes that what you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women. This is a stab at the single-mother household. This suggests that with no father figure around, boys grow up to be these feminine males. They are no longer the leaders of the nation, and they don't wear the "pants" in the family. In society, they no longer play the role of producers. They don't make anything or hunt anything, they are just consumers. Tyler starts fight club, and men come there to find themselves. Tyler has this idea that at fight club, men are stripped away of their possessions and their jobs. There, they are just men in their basic, most animalistic state.

4. Themes • Societal Order vs. Breakdown • With the advent of Project Mayhem, Tyler desires to break down the social order. This is perhaps the theme that ties the other themes together with the book. Starting with the idea that possessions define who you are, workers in society go about their business in pitiful jobs where they are under appreciated and underpaid. They work these jobs because of the American dream idea that is feed to them. They honestly believe that if they work hard enough, they can buy these fabulous goods and become rich as if that is all there is to life. It is because of this dream that they stay in these crappy jobs. This is societal oppression, and the world goes around on the back of these workers. Without them, the social order would crumble.

5. Themes • Human Scarifies • Project Mayhem homework assignments are called human sacrifices. The human sacrifices serve to jump start people into a better life through the threat of death. It is based on the idea of if you died right now, what would you wish you had done with your life? Whatever you wish you would have done, you must do to lift yourself out of your complacent oppressive position in society.

6. Philosophy • Existentialism: A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. • Basically everything we are is a choice, even our gender, race, sexual preference.

7. Philosophy • FredrichNietzche ( 19th century German philosopher) • Perspectivism • The Will to Power • Eternal Return of the Same • Nihilism • Weakness of Woman

8. Philosophy • Perspectivism • There is no such thing as absolute Truth, but we can only see parts of it… No one has a birds eye point of view.

9. Philosophy • The Will to Power: • Most thinkers of the time believed the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges this and suggests that people and animals really want power

10. Philosophy • Eternal Return of the Same • is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time and/or infinite space

11. Philosophy • The Overman or Übermensch • The overman, says Nietzsche, must be willed: we must not be content with our current state of mediocrity, but strive for perfection. Nietzsche points out, though, that if perfection is accomplished, then the process has ended, and growth ceases. The overman seeks to overcome everything she/he has internalized from external sources, especially society and religion. "The striving for distinction," as Nietzsche calls it, is the process of creating something that is truly one's own (a self); through the will to power, the overman reaches self-realization, but does not stop there.

12. Philosophy • Übermensch continued… • . Because of the "will of spirit," the overman continually creates a new self by surpassing (overcoming) the old self: by continually taking risks and always accepting responsibility for her/his actions and values, the overman lives by her/his self-created values, realizing she/he is these actions, thus acquiring freedom through growth.”

13. Philosohy • Nihilism • Existential nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence.

14. Philosophy • The strength of the weak • “All women are subtle in exaggerating their weaknesses; they are inventive when it comes to weaknesses in order to appear as utterly fragile ornaments who are hurt even by a speck of dust. Their existence is supposed to make men feel clumsy, and guilty on that score. Thus they defend themselves against the strong and "the law of the jungle."

15. Day 14ish • Name the type figurative language used; what the speaker literally means; the theme used; and why? • “It is so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you are told to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.” ( Palahniuk 12)

16. Anaphora (rhetoric) • In rhetoric, an Anaphora (Greek: ἀναφορά, "carrying back") is a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis.

17. Irony • a literary term referring to how a person, situation, statement, or circumstance is not as it would actually seem. Many times it is the exact opposite of what it appears to be. There are many types of irony, the three most common being verbal irony, dramatic irony, and cosmic irony. Verbal irony occurs when either the speaker means something totally different than what he is saying or the audience realizes, because of their knowledge of the particular situation to which the speaker is referring, that the opposite of what a character is saying is true. Verbal irony also occurs when a character says something in jest that, in actuality, is true.

18. Verbal irony • Verbal irony occurs when either the speaker means something totally different than what he is saying or the audience realizes, because of their knowledge of the particular situation to which the speaker is referring, that the opposite of what a character is saying is true. Verbal irony also occurs when a character says something in jest that, in actuality, is true.

19. Dramatic irony • Dramatic irony occurs when facts are not known to the characters in a work of literature but are known by the audience.

20. Cosmic irony • Cosmic irony suggests that some unknown force brings about dire and dreadful events. • http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony

21. Day 16.395 • Create one quote question about Fight Club. Be prepared to share the quote, question, and page number.