The Art of Writing Disturbing Books

I read an author's note about Fight Club in the back of the book, and Palahniuk said that one of his main purposes in writing this book was to make it more disturbing than the book he published before Fight Club. To name all of the highly disturbing things in this book would be impossible, so I'll just name a few I guess. For one, the narrator/main character goes to cancer support groups every day of the week, even though he doesn’t have cancer. At these support groups, the afflicted and dying patients hug one another for comfort. The narrator attends these group sessions and pretends to have various cancers and diseases just to hug people for long periods of time, and to cry and lower himself to nothing. He does so to feel better about himself, and to really experience death, so that when he leaves he somehow feels much better. Ironically, the narrator meets Marla Singer, one of the main characters at one of these support groups. Marla was the only woman at the testicular cancer support group, “Remaining Men Together.” For some reason, no one says anything to her, and I found it humorous.

Death is a pretty big theme in this book. The narrator’s best friend, Tyler Durden, has a fear that he will die without a scar on his body, thus he and the narrator (who is unnamed) start a fight club, because Tyler wants to know what it feels like to be punched really hard.

Tyler Durden is undoubtedly the most dynamic, influential, and disturbing character in the book. He is employed as a movie projectionist, a soap-maker, and a waiter on different days of the week, and he takes none of these jobs seriously. Palahniuk perhaps created this aspect of the character simply to make the reader cringe. Tyler splices “inappropriate” film frames into kids’ movies while he is bored on the job. As a soap-maker, Tyler uses the chemical lye in the process of making his product, and one day he told the narrator about how lye and water react to produce the most painful burn imaginable. He then proceeds to kiss the narrator’s hand and pour lye on it. As a waiter (in a very expensive and esteemed hotel dining room), Tyler spends his down time on the job…relieving himself into the food. All of Tyler’s schemes are eventually found out and punished, but, in accordance with his strange philosophy, Tyler doesn’t care about the punishment. He laughs at it. He allows himself to “hit rock bottom” as a person, because he believes it is the only way to be saved, and to be built back up.

I’m about 2/3 of the way through the novel, and right now I feel as if some sort of plot twist is coming up soon. Throughout the book I’ve noticed that the narrator’s friend, Tyler, is never seen with Marla Singer (Tyler’s “love” interest). Just recently, the narrator and Tyler have been acting very similarly and the sentence, “I know this because Tyler knows this,” has been very common. The mystery behind this grows as I keep reading, and I’m very anxious to see what Palahniuk does with this in the end.