Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
The house at Paper Street has a mighty specific street address, but we never find out what city we're in. It's your textbook Anytown, USA strategy. The original location of fight club doesn't matte...
Narrator Point of View
Most of Fight Club is straight up first person. Makes sense, right? If we were getting all this from an outside perspective, we'd know that our narrator and Tyler were the same person, and where wo...
Genre
In the afterword of the 2005 Norton paperback, Chuck Palahniuk says about Fight Club's genre, One reviewer called the book science fiction. Another called it a satire on the Iron John men's movemen...
What's Up With the Title?
The title of Palahniuk's novel is a textbook example of WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. This isn't Cuddly Penguin Club or Talk About Your Feelings Club. This is fight club, and sweetie, you'...
What's Up With the Ending?
In the last chapter of Fight Club, our narrator wakes up in heaven after shooting himself in the face to kill the Tyler side of his personality.Okay, he's not quite in heaven. He's in a hospital, a...
Tough-o-Meter
Fight Club can be a wee bit confusing. Our unreliable narrator's storytelling skills don't rely on a coherent chronology, and he's purposefully vague and misleading about almost everything. Not hel...