Fight Club Unreliable Narrator Essay

How does the unreliable narrator and their mental illness affect the audience's perception of reality in the films Fight Club and Shutter Island

Introduction

"A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling, or mood".First person narration can have a huge impact on how the audience perceives the reality of the situation going on in a film.A narrator that has a mental illness can hinder the audience from seeing the story as it truly is, causing the character, who's telling the story or whose point of view we see it from, to be labeled what is known as the unreliable narrator. In the film Fight Club the main character, who is never addressed by his name and is credited in the credits as just "The Narrator"(Edward Norton), is the narrator of his own story. Through the film's first person narration and use of Dissociative Identity Disorder in the form of Tyler Durden(Brad Pitt), his alter ego, we see the protagonist's life take a drastic turn and eventually into a downward spiral. The movie Shutter Island's approach to narration is somewhat different from Fight Club in that the main character Teddy Daniels( Leonardo DiCaprio) doesn’t narrate the story, in fact, there is no narrator at all, instead we see the story from Teddy's point of view and him

He eventually meets Tyler Durden, together they form a secret club known as "Fight Club". Later on they start to make more and more drastic actions such as blowing up credit card companie's buildings. Unbeknownst to the audience the narrator suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. At the end of the film the audience finds out Tyler Durden isn't real and is actually his alter ego that he created " You wanted a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look , I fuck like you wanna fuck.... Im free in all the ways you are