Fight Club Themes

Fight Club Themes

Society and Class

Class warfare has been making headlines for longer than we can remember. And in 1996, Fight Club's Tyler Durden was making his statement. Although Project Mayhem's methods are radical and dangerous...

Rules and Order

Whenever a society experiences a major change—death of a monarch, coup of a dictator, destruction of a SIM city—the first thing to go down is usually the creation of new rules. And Fight Club i...

Men and Masculinity

From WWE to UFC to sumo wrestling, men just love ripping off their shirts and getting into big sweaty fights. We're not sure why, but we do know that the men in Fight Club are no different. They wa...

Man and the Natural World

Damascus, the capital of Syria, is credited as the oldest continually inhabited city on earth (source)—it's been around for over 8,000 years. Yowza. Makes us remember that before apartment buildi...

Dissatisfaction

In the 1920s, writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein were known as a "lost generation," as their values were no longer relevant in post-WWI America. The young peo...

Mortality

Death happens. Every day. And everyone has to find their own way to cope with it. The characters in Fight Club choose to confront their own mortality head on by steeping themselves in death. They t...

Identity

Clark Kent and Superman. Bruce Wayne and Batman. Mindy Macready and Hit-Girl. Tyler Durden and... Tyler Durden? Tyler Durden, with his super-human powers of persuasion, may not technically be a sup...

Love

Romeo and Juliet. Wuthering Heights. Fight Club. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong. Or does it? Romeo & Juliet has sword fights and suicide. Wut...

Violence

Add the words "fight club" to anything—even Jane Austen—and it's going to get bloody. Fight Club isn't about sugar-coating anything. Palahniuk exposes us to the harsh reality of our narrator's...

Religion

There's a fine, fine line between a religion and a cult. But what's the difference? Number of followers? The values and tenets? The personality of their leaders? Whichever they are, religion or cul...