Fight Club Literary Analysis

There are many different ways that reader can choose to interpret a literary work that they are reading or examining. The Freudian lens is one of the many tools that helps reader understand the in depth meaning of the main characters through their behaviors, characteristics, actions and their surroundings. Fight Club, a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, can also be interpreted by using the Freudian theory to analyze the main character, Joe (the narrator) and his discreet personality, Tyler Durden. The story is about the narrator’s depressing life in which he has been suffering from reality, until he has created another personality that represents his desire. In Fight Club, the narrator’s traits of aggressiveness, his desire and his sense of

In the novel, he states: “Except for their humping, Tyler and Marla were never in the same room… This is exactly how my parents were invisible to each other” (Palahniuk 65). Joe compares Tyler and Marla to his parents as how they are never in the same room. There is only sexual attraction but no communication between the two. This collapsed relationship can also be seen as the cause that lead to the narrator’s isolation within society as he has received none of the love from his father but only his mother’s. It affects the way his life turns out to be, his job and his desire. Later in the story, his desire is then being fulfilled by himself when he decides to create another personality of his own to alter his desire. This is where the Id takes place. Everything he wants to do, Tyler has done it. In the novel’s movie version, Tyler, says: “All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look…, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the way that you are not” (Fight Club). Tyler is free in a way that he can do whatever he wants to do, he follows no rules and there seems to be no rule to him through his act of vandalism. He has no jobs nor a specific purpose in his actions. The image of Tyler is then related to Joe. Joe desires to be smart, capable, good looking and especially, he desires to be free. To be free from the

In “Freudian Theory and Consciousness: A Conceptual Analysis”, Avinash De Sousa emphasizes the relationship between the three: “Psychoanalysis regarded everything mental being in the first place unconscious, and thus for them, consciousness might be present or absent” (Avinash). According to De Sousa, the id is the reason that the ego and superego forms. In Fight Club, as the narrator suffers from the lack of love from his parents, his desires then develops the id then the ego and at the end, superego. The narrator behavior keep bouncing from the three stages as the story approaches its climax when he decides to kill his innermost desire himself, Tyler. The id, ego and superego have an important role which help explain the narrator’s actions and