There are a lot of underlying messages in the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk about masculinity. The mechanic says, “If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?” (133). This quote is one main passage that shows how masculinity works in this particular novel.
Masculinity is in Fight Club portrayed in an extreme way. According to the book to be a man you have to beat the living crap out of another man but after the meeting you can’t talk about it. Masculinity is hidden in the fight club or testicular cancer group and only in these groups can men feel but outside these groups they can not show any emotion. Another way of looking at it is looking at one character, Bob. Bob is a model of masculinity because he had a job as a body builder and after cancer he was reduced to a feminine body with “bitch tits.”
Looking at the passage on page 133, the father model is masqueline, which is where you get the view of masculinity. Since the father is the model, which when the father is absent then the mother becomes the model but is feminine. So as a man with no father model or figure he would search for a figure, therefore in order to be a man fight club is produced.
Lyotard would argue that masculinity is something that everyone knows about but this novel takes parts of masculinity that we would not reconize and its alluding to the fact of unrepresentable parts of masculinity. Jameson would say that the masculinity is not being represented anymore except for movies and books.
October 7, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Hi Tammy,
I think the saddest part of this novel is the end. When the masculinity you talk about is threatened by feminization, a battle to reclaim what it once was is fought to the death. The question then becomes, to the death of what? Obviously, Tyler (the ultimate metaphore for masculinity) is either killed off or integrated. However the reader interprets it, neither the narrator nor Tyler are fully independent of each other’s influence and there seems to be no escaping the social damage of extreme feminine or masculine categories. What is revealed instead is that to escape the perils of either, one must escape them all. While the destruction of this classification seems hopeful and the narrator is finally at peace, he can only find that peace by leaving the world in which he once lived in – the one that is our own. By being institutionalized, he can finally “just be.” Interestingly, the only thing he has escaped is his susceptibility of being defined by capitalism. He has merely left one institution for another, confining himself once again in the wake of realizing that our world may never change.
October 16, 2007 at 5:28 am
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