How It All Goes Down
- Project Mayhem is born from fight club. And "[t]he first rule about Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions about Project Mayhem." (16.9)
- This is Tyler's new project: recruiting average men off the street and turning them into warriors against society.
- They are assigned a variety of homework, like, say, fighting a stranger or buying a gun.
- Meanwhile, our narrator is filled with more rage than usual. He beats the boogers out of a handsome guy at fight club. He says, "I was in the mood to destroy something beautiful" (16.50). Hmmm.
- But it doesn't work. He still feels tense. He wonders if he's become desensitized to the violence and needs to move up to something bigger.
- Project Mayhem might be just the ticket: "The goal of Project Mayhem [is] the complete and right-away destruction of civilization" (16.78).
- Yeah, that seems like something bigger.This can't end well.