17 Things to Know about Chuck Palahniuk (PaulaNick) and Fight Club

17. Class is one of the key issues at play in Palahniuk's fictions
See page 215/16 of the Norton paperback Afterword, p. 166


16. If you read Freud's work carefully, you won't be surprised to learn that he lurks here and there in the foundation of Fight Club
See p214 of the Afterword and 140 and 134

15. Fight Club began as an experiment, a literary experiment born of cinema (in particular, the work of director/writer Orson Welles)
p213


14. One of the secrets of Fight Club is that it is a novelistic recreation/rendering/version of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias 

p. 201, Fight Club, 159

13. Fight Club is a love letter to Thanatos, the Greek daemon/personification of Death

See the death scene of Robert Paulson, Big Bob p. 177

12. Palahniuk is fascinated by the waking dream state--hallucination, fugue, and disassociative personality disorders/ schizophrenia
p168/p.173


11. The Raymond Hessel chapter is an inspiring allegory for sophomore undergraduates everywhere!
p152 "Human sacrifices"  euphemism!

10. It pays dividends to consider the politics of Fight Club--ultimately is PROJECT MAYHEM fascist, libertariany, anarchist, or it it better thought of as a violent form of collective existentialism
pp. 149-150


9. YOU ARE NOT YOUR NAME--Fight Club is a meditation on identity and alienation.
p. 143

8. Fight Club believes that Corporate America is weaving a mind-killing womb for narcotized, product saturated, non-citizen, non-sentient consumers
p. 137, 38  and 121 and 110-11


7.Anarchy emerges as a sub-theme of Fight Club.
p. 124



6. Palahniuk develops Masks as a key motif of Fight Club.
p. 118

5. Palahniuk is a master of black humor, of arch satire and comedy
p. 106 (on pathological sexuality)



4. Fight Club is an edgy meditation on auto-eroticism and narcissism
p85