Those Pesky Anecdotes

Fight Club was a book that I really found a pleasure to read. It possessed a style of prose that was able to be rebellious and incoherent without losing the plot as a result. Really, I was continuously impressed with how much story Palahnuik manages to tell despite it not feeling like the real focus of the book.

My favorite parts of Fight Club, however, were the small and easily ignorable anecdotes that pop up throughout the novel. The boyfriend Marla had who had terrible nightmares, so he took amphetamines to stay awake until they killed them. All the descriptions of technical possibilities of the making of napalm, of filing a cross in the tip of bullets to make them spread. These small things were the most enjoyable to me.

Nihilism vs Existentialism

I find Fight Club to be quite entertaining. It's frenetic, disjunctive, and seems incredibly random at times, a perfect read after the coherency of The Plague. That being said, I have not found Fight Club to be as good as Camus, yet.

The reason I started to thoroughly enjoy The Plague was it's tone and characters. I find it difficult to get involved in characters, even ones as intriguing as Tyler, with the disjunctive style and frenetic pacing. Now granted, this is a fun read with it's humor ("I want you to hit me as hard as you can") and has some really intriguing scenes (the beach scene contains one of my new favorite quotes of all time, something to the effect of "A single moment of perfection is worth the hours of work put into it") but at the pace it's going, it doesn't seem to be on the same grounds as Camus' book.

I could be wrong, maybe I'll find it to be my favorite book ever, we'll see.

yay extra credit.

First I will start by saying thank you so much Mr. Lavender for giving me this amazing opportunity of receiving extra credit for simply attending your class. That's why you are the best.
Secondly I would like to talk about the writing in this book. I love it! Everything about it. I love how chopped up and sporadic it is. It reminds me a lot of how I write. I don't change subjects as quickly but I love the way he interrupts himself with reality. and another thing that I really appreciate about the writing is how he uses just one word. Like when they are in the different medical help groups and he looks at a girl in the testicular cancer group and he thinks "faker, faker" but he knows she is saying the same thing about him. Even though she may not know whether or not he has testicular cancer there is a certain spotlight effect that he displays. As if everyone is focusing on him and everything he does someone has some sort of interest in him. If he doesn't say anything he believes people take extra notice to him because things are "really bad" and so on. It is really interesting. I really like what I have read so far though.

Don't WOrry.... no Spoilers

As Shanna said, "I think he writes like I do," I kind of think the same. Except I feel like I think like he writes. It hits home in a certain way, but how my brain is so random kind of drives me crazy so the fragments make me want something that flows! I do like the suspense the type of writing creates.
One of my favorite quotes from the first 46 pages is "everyone smiles with an invisible gun to their head." I feel like it's so true. Because of the world we human beings have created for ourselves we are constantly under a subtle stress that hides beneeth our smiles. I find it true that people are more stressed than they are happy, which is sad, but when they are I feel like the true meaning of happy has shifted.
I guess I can see this strand of unhappiness and underlying worry/stress in the book. The fragments might be there to conceal the unhappiness because if you don't expand, then you don't have to explain anything, like why you are unhappy.
Take Marla and the Narrator being in the classes for example. They are finding this "happiness" in these classes where no one is really happy. Are they taking advantage of the fact that they are less unhappy then these people? Does that make them seem "happier?"

Fight Club

I've read this book once already, and I have seen the movie. Reading this book for the second time makes me feel sort of dumb. The twist is almost obvious. "What Tyler knows, I know." Everything seems to give away the twist, but yet no one in a million years could ever guess the ending. I also like this book because it's like a rookie signing with a pro team and then ending up being the star his first year. As we've talked about in class, Palahniuk does make mistakes because this is his first book and he still made it big. I don't beleive that this book shows the pure genius that The Plague did, but it is very entertaining and the idea is great. I love the idea of Nihilism, because nothing really does matter. Once we are gone from here, I don't believe that we will float up and live in bliss in the sky. This is it, and this book presents this in a great and entertaining way. Yes at times, The Plague was very boring, but at the same time it was presenting such a cool idea.

I need some soap *SPOILERS*

First off, I love this book. I couldn't put it down that first day we got it assigned, so I finished it in one night. I think that it's a lot better than The Plauge. Fight Club speaks to me a bit more. The whole death and rock bottom thing, and giving up for a full release of mental stress, the total freedom to enjoy life by having nothing. It's all very interesting, and I like that message better than Camus' be aware of every moment by anxiety. Freedom > Anxiety. Plus the book has given me some interesting ideas of what to do with the giant bags of fat I have sitting in my freezer. I could use some soap. Plus the freon lock break, the CRT bomb (which is luckily becoming mostly unfeasible), the water pressure thing, etc. that stuff is very interesting. Not that I'll ever try civil terrorism. I felt that reading the book after the movie was really beneficial, I may have missed out on the wonderful narrative twist at the end but it was still nice knowing it cause it made a lot of stuff about the rest of the book make sense.
The one thing that has never made much sense to me was how Tyler knew as much as he did about soap, explosives, and terrorism. Was he running around experimenting and researching during the insomnia at the beginning of the book? How did he learn all that? Cause he had to teach it to the narrator. Although Chuck Palahniuk seems a little suicidal. His whole obsession with release from all the worries and problems of life via death is a little creepy.

Mortality

Although I really love how the novel is written, initially I felt that Fight Club was another trashy novel that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. However, as I have come to read more and more I’m beginning to understanding the characters role play and the general themes of the book. I found it to be quite a twist that Tyler is in fact the narrator. Once learning this, the previous readings of the book seemed to make more sense to me. Fight Club has opened a new spectrum of death, mortality and humans vs. the “animal”. I found it especially interesting when Tyler speaks of death and pain in chapter nine. Pain and death are a byproduct of our mortality (something Tyler and the narrator argue about) “Think about the animals used in product testing. Think about the monkey shot into space. Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice, we would have nothing.” The quote seems almost contradictory to the rest of the characters feelings in the book. Death is the only way of escape used by those who have horrible illnesses and diseases, but Tyler continues to escape his mortality by forcing his mind into a different world, one filled with no pain.