Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club is an unprecedented novel that deals specifically with the problem of creating secure identities in the face of modern challenges: consumerism, capitalism, emasculating white-collar work , absence of fathers and an absence of historical specificity. The protagonist of the text is a figure so lost in the boredom of modern life that he is driven to create a rebellious alter ego who has the courage to put his unconscious desires into action and which promises liberation from his state of anonymity. The disastrous results that are obtained say a lot about the postmodern world in which the story is set; a world that borrows heavily from our own. This essay will explore the various causes of the "identity problem" proposed by Palahniuk, as well as the various solutions that his characters desperately implement. It will be argued that identity in modern times, as conceived by Fight Club, is a problem as urgent as it is unsolvable. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One of Fight Club's primary concerns in relation to the issue of identity is the notion of consumerism and, by extension, capitalism, commodification, and the endless pursuit of self-improvement. Early in the story, the narrator recognizes the futility of acquisition as a basis for identity. His home is a high-rise apartment building, "a sort of filing cabinet for young professionals." This metaphor adequately describes both the stark physical reality of the apartment building and the psychological effects of the resulting dislocation. Recounting the incident of the bombing of his house, he later comments on his feelings towards its internal contents: "You buy furniture. You tell yourself this is the last sofa I'll need in my life... then for a couple of years you are satisfied that, whatever goes wrong, at least you have your own sofa. The perfect bed. The curtains that you owned, now belong to you.' (p.44) The narrator's acute awareness of his generation's debilitating obsession with consumption grows along with his relationship with the anti-consumerism rogue, Tyler (who is, of course, just another side of the narrator's personality). In a passage that is as depressing as it is funny, the narrator catalogs all the IKEA items he owned that were destroyed by the bomb thrown by Tyler. The specificity of his descriptions of the objects, along with the number he owns, underlines the extent of his obsession of an illness that, he notes, afflicts many others: “I was not the only slave to my nesting instinct” (p. 43). Significantly, he prefaces this very specific list of items with: 'We all have the same thing '…(p.43). Not only is his generation concerned with acquiring items that, as he explained, they "end up owning," but the items themselves (aside from options for various colors and combinations) are not even unique; everyone has essentially identical things. The sheer quantity of colors and designs in which they are available, along with the narrator's extraordinary ability to recite these colors and designs, underline the scale of this multinational's success; a success made possible by a global obsession with appearance, consumption, convenience, time saving and profit, all at the expense of depth, originality and substance. With Tyler's help, the narrator realizes that the perpetual processes of self-improvement and acquisition are doomed and incapable of producing a stable or genuine sense of identity. "Oh Tyler!" he exclaims, “Deliver me from Swedish furniture.” Free me from intelligent art. That Inever be happy. May I never be perfect' (p.46). In saying this prayer, the narrator demonstrates his rejection of society's concern with superficiality; a concern that Palahniuk proves to be as chronic as it is hopeless. As Tyler and the narrator discover, the problem of consumerism is not limited to their own generation and class; it also exists in the upper echelons of society. This is perhaps most poignantly demonstrated in the catering job where Tyler torments the wealthy hostess of a glamorous party - one where "titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and shout at each other while wearing diamonds bigger than how much [the narrator] feels” (p.81) – claiming to have urinated in one of her perfume bottles. What was intended to be a mischievous statement against flashy wealth quickly becomes a pitiful and ugly scene in which the initially level-headed landlady ("Madam") is left drunk and bloodied on the bathroom floor, with her shattered perfume bottles and his mood completely destroyed. Accusing her husband of having an affair with a guest, declaring that she was "tired of all the people calling them friends" (p.83) and shocked by the arson act, the once immaculate woman, who seemed to have it all, turns out to have very little. With this scene, and others like it, Palahniuk paints a picture of a bleak world in which people continually try (and fail) to base their identity on the objects they own and the image they project, rather than on the person they are or about what they believe. It is a world where 'there is no you and there is no I' (p.164) – just empty shells; artificial exteriors; structures without interiors. In Palahniuk's text, not only are capitalism and commodification harmful to the individual's conception of self, but also to the workplace - and, by extension - to individuals attempting to carve out an identity within the workplace. Work. The story's narrator works as an "insurance adjuster," a role in which he robotically applies a mathematical algorithm to determine whether a product recall or damage compensation would be more appropriate for his company. This process demonstrates the way in which labor has succumbed to the logic of profit maximization and cost minimization at the expense of moral or ethical considerations regarding the people involved – in this case, those affected by the malfunction of goods produced by the company's customers . With this process people are dehumanized; they are reduced to their corporeal forms as figures of profit or responsibility. But this dehumanization is not only inflicted on the general public by the company, but is also inflicted on the workers employed to accomplish their goals, like the narrator. This is perhaps best highlighted in the early sections of the story where the narrator describes the monotony of air travel he must endure to aid his work. He states: 'You wake up at Air Harbor International... You wake up at O'Hare. You wake up in La Guardia. You wake up in Logan' (p.25). This repetition is carried forward throughout the chapter, with several other airports where he "wakes up" inserted intermittently between dialogue and descriptions. There is no sense of personal agency conveyed in this repeated phrase, rather, he is a pawn who is transported endlessly between cities at the whim of anonymous superiors, only learning his whereabouts upon awakening. But perhaps the most surprising disadvantage of the work he undertakes, made evident more than anything by the absence of description, is the loneliness it generates. Nowhere in the sections set in his workplace do we learn the names of his colleagues (or even anything about his colleagues). There is no allusion to any sense of community, not even a well-founded oneabout mutual hatred for the work they have to do. The only detailed exchanges are between the narrator and his boss – whose name, significantly, we never learn. The workplace he describes isn't even one where stress is a focus: instead he seems to float in and out, completely apathetic towards the company which appears to be equally apathetic towards him. This sense of apathy is not limited to the insurance job where the narrator works. When Tyler is fired from his job as a projectionist, for example, he displays an attitude that indicates that he has been treated in much the same way. Addressing his boss, he states, "I'm trash and shit and crazy to you and this whole damn world... You don't care where I live or how I feel, or what I eat or how I feed my kids or how I pay." to the doctor if I get sick, and yes, I'm stupid and bored and weak, but I'm still your responsibility.' (p.115) These concrete lines describe how workers are not treated as real people with individual personalities and experiences, but rather as machines that companies use for their own ends. This is perhaps best exemplified in the boss's innocuous response to Tyler: “We appreciate your contribution to our success” (p. 113). Much like the narrator (unsurprisingly, as they are one and the same), Tyler realizes that he is completely disposable in the eyes of his superiors, who focus on profit at the expense of their employers' lives. Just as the narrator and Tyler find consumption to be an inadequate source of self-fulfillment and identity, so they also find the boring jobs they are forced to work in—and which have been corrupt capitalist imperatives—totally insufficient. In these jobs, they are not people. Rather, they are human resources. The identity crisis that occurs in postmodern societies and explored in Fight Club is one in which men face particular challenges. The futile consumerism mentioned above, combined with the exploitative nature of work, not only dehumanizes but also emasculates, since men have an innate desire for control, and since both result in a loss of control. The story depicts a world where young people are unprepared for the life that awaits them and completely lost as to the purpose of their existence. Palahniuk strives to locate this problem beyond the realms of consumerism and work. To this end, the issue of fathers is one to which repeated attention is paid. The narrator explains that the rebellious Tyler "never knew his father" (p.49). The narrator had known his father "for about six years" (p.50), but remembers nothing. His adult relationships with his absent father revolve around the irregular long-distance phone calls he makes when he comes to the crossroads in his life, asking "Now what?" His father is never able to give birth, meaning the narrator is consigned to a life of restless fluctuation. But what is the deeper meaning of the absence of fathers? At one point, the narrator states "What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women" (p.50) and later, the mechanic (who is essentially parroting Tyler) explains "If you're male and you" If you are a Christian and live in America, your father is your role model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father runs away or dies or is never home, what do you believe about God? (page 141). This is perhaps the most important line in the entire text, as it encapsulates both the cause and nature of the problem that Fight Club seeks to solve, as well as indicating the possible repercussions of the problem. Without male role models, young people are unable to build complete visions of who they are, because they don't know where they come from. Furthermore, I am unable to conceptualizefully daunting questions about the world around them, about the meaning of existence (“what [they] believe about God), and, therefore, what they believe about themselves. Without fathers, these men don't know who they are. An extension of the problem of fathers within the text is the problem of history. The men of Fight Club, especially the narrator, have an ambivalent attitude towards the story. On the one hand, they resent their role as heirs to a deeply troubled past. This is exemplified in the narrator's outburst which begins with 'for thousands of years, humans have been messing up, destroying and shitting on this 'planet, and now the story expected me to clean up after everyone' (p.124). He is overwhelmed by the scale of the world's problems, angry that he is expected to solve them, and frustrated by his inability to do so. Therefore, he sees destruction as the only solution – not simply the destruction of problematic places and things (e.g. endangered pandas, damaged rainforests), but of culture and history itself, declaring that he wants to "burn the Louvre… and obliterate [his] ass with the Mona Lisa” (p. 124). Echoing Tyler, he wants to literally destroy history, “rid the world of it” (p. 124) in an attempt to alleviate his own. frustration regarding his inability to solve his problems. There is another aspect of the narrator and his colleagues' attitude towards the story. Not only do they wish to "destroy" him so that he can no longer torment them, but they also wish to control him: two desires that seem to be in opposition. Feeling themselves as "middle children of God" (p.141), with no special place in history, but rather in a perpetual postmodern present devoid of peculiarities, they want to carve out a "special place" for themselves through Project Mayhem - the anarchic group born from Fight Club and which consisted of a series of growing disruptions aimed at businesses, consumer consumption and the financial system itself. By reaping the chaos in society – perhaps even dying in the process – the men of Project Mayhem hope to make up for their feelings of insignificance caused by their abandonment, their emasculation, and their unfortunate place in history. As Tyler explains: “Getting God's attention because he was bad was better than getting no attention at all.” Perhaps because God's hatred is better than his indifference" (p.141). This line reveals the extent of the narrator's (and his peers') sense of worthlessness and anonymity in a world where they are "the filth and salves of history" (p.123), all too aware of the scope of the world. problems, but without solutions. Just as significant as the multiple causes of unstable identities that this text explores (consumerism, commodification, dehumanization through work, abandonment, lack of historical specificity) are the comments it makes on the solutions adopted to correct these problematic identities. While initially effective, the cancer support groups the narrator attends in an attempt to cathartically cure his insomnia ultimately prove ineffective, as he feels exposed by the fact that Marla knows he is a fake. Both his and Marla's sick obsession with hanging out with these groups highlights the extent of their desperation, their loneliness, and their utter lack of direction in their depressing lives. They don't know who they are and, to deal with the problem, they masquerade as people they aren't. In this way they are granted a vision of death and, paradoxically, this is the only thing that helps them feel alive. Fight Club are similar in that they strip the narrator of his (unstable) identity, reducing him to an anonymous body, and allowing him to feel more alive by bringing him closer to death – in this case, through masochistic violence.,: 1996).