Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. Inspired by his doctor's exasperated remark that insomnia is not suffering, the protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups. Then he meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
Fight Club centers on an anonymous narrator, who works as a product recall specialist for an unnamed car company. Because of the stress of his job and the jet lag brought upon by frequent business trips, he begins to suffer from recurring insomnia. When he seeks treatment, the narrator's doctor advises him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims to "see what real suffering is like". The narrator finds that sharing the problems of others - despite not actually having testicular cancer himself - alleviates his insomnia.
The narrator's unique treatment works until he meets Marla Singer, another "tourist" who visits the support group under false pretenses. The possibly disturbed Marla reminds the narrator that he is a faker who does not belong there. He begins to hate Marla for keeping him from crying, and, therefore, from sleeping. After a confrontation, the two agree to attend separate support group meetings to avoid each other. The truce is uneasy, however, and the narrator's insomnia returns.
While on a nude beach, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, a charismatic extremist of mysterious means. After an explosion destroys the narrator's condominium, he asks to stay at Tyler's house. Tyler agrees, but asks for something in return: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." Both men find that they enjoy the ensuing fistfight. They subsequently move in together and establish a "fight club", drawing numerous men with similar temperaments into bare - knuckle fighting matches, set to the following rules:
- You don't talk about fight club.
- You don't talk about fight club.
- When someone says stop, or goes limp, the fight is over.
- Only two guys to a fight.
- One fight at a time.
- They fight without shirts or shoes.
- The fights go on as long as they have to.
- If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.
--Fight Club, pages 48-50
Later in the book, a mechanic tells the narrator about two new rules of the fight club: nobody is the center of the fight club except for the two men fighting, and the fight club will always be free.
Marla, noticing that the narrator has not recently attended his support groups, calls him to claim that she has overdosed on Xanax in a half-hearted suicide attempt. Tyler returns from work, picks up the phone to Marla's drug-induced rambling, and rescues her. Tyler and Marla embark on an uneasy affair that confounds the narrator and confuses Marla. Throughout this affair, Marla is unaware both of fight club's existence and the interaction between Tyler and the narrator. Because Tyler and Marla are never seen at the same time, the narrator wonders if Tyler and Marla are the same person.
As fight club attains a nationwide presence, Tyler uses it to spread his anti - consumerist ideas, recruiting fight club's members to participate in increasingly elaborate pranks on corporate America. He eventually gathers the most devoted fight club members and forms "Project Mayhem", a cult - like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization.
While initially a loyal participant in Project Mayhem, the narrator becomes uncomfortable with the increasing destructiveness of its activities. He resolves to stop Tyler and his followers when Bob, a friend from the testicular cancer support group, is killed during one of Project Mayhem's sabotage operations. However, the narrator learns that he himself is Tyler Durden.
As the narrator's mental state deteriorated, his mind formed a new personality that was able to escape from the problems of his life. Marla inadvertently reveals to the narrator that he and Tyler are the same person. Tyler's affair with Marla - whom the narrator professes to dislike - was actually the narrator's own affair with Marla. The narrator's bouts of insomnia had actually been Tyler's personality surfacing; Tyler was active whenever the narrator was "sleeping". The Tyler personality not only created fight club, he also blew up the narrator's condo.
Tyler plans to blow up a skyscraper using homemade bombs created by Project Mayhem; the actual target of the explosion, however, is the nearby national museum. Tyler plans to die as a martyr during this event, taking the narrator's life as well. Realizing this, the narrator sets out to stop Tyler, although Tyler is always thinking ahead of him. The narrator makes his way to the roof of the building, where Tyler holds him at gunpoint. However, when Marla comes to the roof with one of the support groups, Tyler vanishes, as Tyler "was his hallucination, not hers."
With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bomb to explode and kill him. However, the bomb malfunctions because Tyler mixed paraffin into the explosives. Still alive and holding Tyler's gun, the narrator makes the first decision that is truly his own: he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots himself. Some time later, he awakens in a mental hospital, believing he is in Heaven, and imagines an argument with God over human nature. The book ends with the narrator's being approached by hospital employees who reveal themselves to be Project members. They tell him their plans still continue, and that they are expecting Tyler to come back.
A modern-day everyman figure as well as an employee specializing in recalls for an unnamed car company, the narrator - who remains unnamed throughout the novel - is extremely depressed and suffers from insomnia. Some readers call him "Joe", because of his constant use of the name in such statements as, "I am Joe's boiling point". The quotes, "I am Joe's [blank]", refer to the narrator's reading old Reader's Digest articles in which human organs write about themselves in the first person, with titles such as "I Am Joe's Liver". The film adaptation replaces "Joe" with "Jack", inspiring some fans to call the narrator "Jack". In the novel and film, the narrator uses various aliases in the support groups. His subconscious is in need of a sense of freedom, he inevitably feels trapped within his own body, and when introduced to Tyler Durden, he begins to see all of the qualities he lacks in himself: "I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage, his smarts, and his nerve. Tyler is funny and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not."
"Because of his nature", Tyler works night jobs where he sabotages companies and harms clients. He also steals left-over drained human fat from liposuction clinics to supplement his income through soap making and to create the ingredients for bomb manufacturing, which will be put to work later with his fight club. He is the co-founder of Fight Club, as it was his idea to instigate the fight that led to it. He later launches Project Mayhem, from which he and the members commit various attacks on consumerism. Tyler is blond, according to the narrator's comment "in his everything-blond way". The unhinged but magnetic Tyler becomes the antagonist of the novel later in the story. The narrator refers to Tyler as a free spirit who says, "Let that which does not matter truly slide."
A woman whom the narrator meets during a support group. The narrator no longer receives the same release from the groups when he realizes Marla is faking her problems just as he is. After he leaves the groups, he meets her again when she becomes Tyler's lover. Marla is shown to be extremely unkempt, uncaring, and sometimes even suicidal. However at times she does show a softer, more caring side.
The narrator meets Bob at a support group for testicular cancer. A former bodybuilder, Bob lost his testicles to cancer caused by the steroids he used to bulk up his muscles. He had to undergo testosterone injections, resulting in increased estrogen. The increased estrogen levels caused him to grow large breasts and to develop a softer voice. Because of his "bitch tits", Bob is the only known member who is allowed to wear a shirt. The narrator befriends Bob and, after leaving the groups, meets him again in fight club. Bob's death later in the story, while carrying out an assignment for Project Mayhem, causes the narrator to turn against Tyler because the members of Project Mayhem treat it as a trivial matter instead of a tragedy.
A man who joins fight club. He is very loyal to Project Mayhem, laughing at the vandalism he and a group of "space monkeys" have caused as their crimes appear on the evening news. Angel Face is considered very beautiful, hence his name. The blond-haired beauty suffers a savage beating at the narrator's hands during a fight club session; the narrator states that he "wanted to destroy something beautiful." The next time Angel Face is heard of in the novel, he is described as not being quite as beautiful anymore.
The novel won the following awards: