Formal Analysis # 3: The World According to Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an incredibly engrossing and addictive read. I credit this largely to the author’s wholly original writing style. For a novel that reinforces the concept that human beings are little more than a bunch of banal drones, I must say one need to look no further than this book to find proof that people are capable of original thought. Palahniuk employs a kind of minimalist style to convey his thoughts about the ugliness and triviality of modern day society. His grotesque imagery successfully repulses and attracts his readers; getting them to wince but at the same time getting them face truths about themselves and others that they might usually avoid.
Within the first few lines of the book we are thrust into the mad violence and chaos that is Fight Club: “Tyler gets me a job as waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying the first step to eternal life is having to die” (11). At this point the reader has no frame of reference or context, yet the immediate action all but jumps from the page and grabs us. Character development can wait. What matters now is the gun in our narrator’s mouth. Soon after we realize that the building our characters are standing in will be blown to smithereens in matter of minutes and a tension building countdown ensues. In this way the reader is thrust into the plot with little to no chance of catching our breath.
Another thing that struck me about the story is the rage behind it. The narrator goes from being just another numb, ineffectual person, blindly functioning through the tasks of his daily life, to a fearless, violent madman, hell-bent of self-destruction. Once he realizes the freedom that comes from the total obliteration of everything comfortable, everything familiar, he is addicted to it. To him there is nothing that makes one feel more alive than the destruction of something beautiful. We see this here: “I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see” (123). Here everything we are taught to care about, taught to want to protect, is turned on its head. The narrator does not want to pursue these things. He wants to tear them down. At this point our narrator is acutely aware of the fact that nothing, no location, no person, no object, can make him feel as alive as fight club and the freedom he has gained since he “lost everything” (70).
The fast-paced, fragmented, and controlled style of Palahniuk tends to contrast with the absolute chaos occurring in his story but it works to his advantage. At times he is vague and then without warning will switch to being meticulously descriptive. Unlike any other I have yet to read the author creates an unconventional kind of balance between the bizarre occurrences of his plot and the straightforward, unflinching way in which he relates these events to us.