Fight Club ending

            I just finished reading Fight Club on Monday. It was one of the most interesting and definitely the most thrilling book I’ve ever written. As Mr. Hill commented, it doesn’t really have a genre. Palahniuk uses a lot of short sentences, and he skips around a lot, to create a sort of confused feeling. In the end, it all makes sense, because the goal, I think, was to make the reader just as confused as the narrator was. Basically, the main character of the book, the enigma that is Tyler Durden, turns out to be the narrator himself, or rather his split personality. “We use the same body, just at different times.” This explains why the narrator is always so tired, explains his insomnia throughout the book, and explains why Tyler told the narrator not to talk to anyone about him. Although friends throughout the first part of the book, Tyler and the narrator become enemies in the latter half, even though they are the same person.

Having a split personality is a fascinating concept, and I feel like it’s used in literature a lot; Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde is the most well-known example. But, Palahniuk goes about writing about the subject in a new way. Instead of informing the reader early on and narrating the story from 3^rd person, Palahniuk lets the reader find out as the narrator finds out. In the end of the story, after the reader founds out that the narrator and Tyler are one, everything Tyler has said backfires on him, and causes the narrator to hate the other side of his personality. The novel ends with the narrator killing Tyler, and thus, killing himself as well, to protect the people he loves from getting hurt by his other personality.  

I’ll admit that I was very confused by the story’s plot and by Palahniuk’s style for the first half of the book, but I grew to enjoy his writing style. It’s strange, and very disturbing. It did hold my attention though, and I found Fight Club to be an easy read, not heavy in terms of the reading itself. However, because of Palahniuk’s style, he crams in as many action-packed sequences as possible into a short amount of words. So, after I would finish a five page chapter, the plot would change significantly, and my whole understanding of the book would change as well. I found myself just kind of sitting and thinking after I would finish a section of reading, because so much happened, and I read so fast without stopping that I failed to realize just how disturbing some of the images that Palahniuk creates really are.