Symbolism In Fight Club

Fight club by Chuck Palahniuk is about an average-Joe living an average life, you never get to know his name so I’ll just refer to him as the Narrator. I belive that Palahniuk is expressing his frustration with the upper class and how they still are treating the working class in a bad way, there are many examples in the book that point towards this.

Fight club is about a revolution led by the workers to try to overthrow the upper class. There’s three scenes from the book which highlights this perfectly. The first one is when Tyler puts a split second of pornography into films watched by the upper class. The second one is when the Mechanic takes the Narrator to steal body fat to make soap out of it and sell it to the upper class from which

A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That’s how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.” (Palahniuk, C. 1996). Fight club.

This is a great example of the working class getting back at the upper class, exposing the upper class to obscene pictures without their knowledge. I see it as a way for Tyler to reverse the roles of society, to become the oppressor and the upper class the oppressed.

The second example: “Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we’ll haul back to Paper Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar, these are the only folks who can afford it.” (Palahniuk, C. 1996). Fight

1996). Fight club.

This too is a great example of how the Narrator and Tyler try to get back at the upper class, but this time by altering their foodstuffs. The Narrator and Tyler is doing this troughout of the book. There’s more of these kind of scenes like a time Tyler peed in a upper classe persons soup. They are under constant revolt against the upper class, they go to job interviews and get the job just to do these kind of things against the upper class throughout the book.

With these examples in mind I think my thesis I presented in the introduction is pretty clear, that Palahniuk is using the book to express his frustration with the upper class. Because it is an recurring theme throughout the book that the Narrator and Tyler is revolting against the upper class and doing things to their food for e.g. which for them seems like it is satisfying because the upper class has treated the like cockroaches, the upper class think they can just step on them without any