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Rhetorical Analysis On Fight Club

2293 Words10 Pages

Julia Hedin
College of Communication and Information, University of Kentucky
CIS 111: Composition and Communication ll
Ms. Munoz
March 10, 2023

A rhetorical analysis of Fight Club

Introduction
Fight Club was a thrilling novel written in 1996 by author Chuck Palahniuk. The story follows an anonymous unnamed narrator. He is the typical working class American man stuck into a cycle of working excruciatingly long days under a capitalist society. The stress that is involved with falling victim to the rat race idolized by Americans has caused the narrator to suffer from insomnia. After meeting Tyler Durdan, together, the narrator and him decide to begin a fight club with means to abolish the idea of masculinity and consumerism …show more content…

Background/context Fight Club turns the rise of consumerism during postwar American history into a satire. Americans felt as if their lives were meaningless. Palahunik expresses this throughout the narrator’s perspective in the book recalling his flashbacks. It begins on top of a skyscraper with a man named Tyler Durdan holding a gun in his mouth. He discusses how he had developed insomnia and he was bored with his consumerist lifestyle so he starts attending cancer support groups, despite the fact that he doesn’t have cancer. He expresses strong emotions to sleep well. Tyler and the Narrator later realize that they love fighting after a drunken bar fight, because it makes them feel as if they are truly alive. Together they birth the invention, Fight Club. Tyler forms a society within the secret society, called Project Mayhem. Tyler sends his …show more content…

He enjoys being looked at as someone that matters in the club and is taken away from his usually boring worklife. Since men play such a significant role in shaping their children's attitudes and behavior and he had no presence of a strong father figure he felt like he needed to compensate for this. He says, "My father did not go to college, so I needed to go. After college, I contact him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married (Palahniuk, 51). The narrator believes his father plays a part in his life decisions and he wants to make him proud. He is unable to act as a complete man and lead a family because of the influence on his life when growing up, where his father was not always there. Creating the Fight Club in the bar was how he reclaimed his masculinity. When a person can establish a group following behind them people tend to assume they are powerful, successful and worthy of being listened to. Tyler is everything the narrator is not. A manly, confident, leader who is powerful and not afraid to take the matters of his life into his own hands. The members of the club listened to Tyler as he spread his anti-consumerism ideas. He helped them to see that they were “slaves with white collars, buying shit they don’t need” (Fincher) Tyler was an intelligent man and knew his goals would be impossible to achieve without help. In speeches the words ‘us’,

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