Fight Club: a Search for Identity Anonymous

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an anarchic, pessimistic novel that portrays the need for identity in life and Palahniuk explains, through the narrator’s personality disorder, that the desire for meaning is the sole internal motivation of civilization. In the narrator’s speech throughout the novel, Palahniuk describes how a death without identity is the worst possible death. First in Fight Club, and later in Project Mayhem, the character of Tyler Durden shows how the ultimate motivation will come from a person’s necessity to own a place in history. The author explains that the path to finding one’s meaning is not easy, and can in fact develop into a desperate, indecisive struggle, as it does in the narrator’s case. Fight Club shares a modern perspective on the meaning of life, and portrays how desire can influence the lives of men and women throughout the world.

Palahniuk provides his first perspective on the desire for meaning in life through the narrator’s action. The narrator is living a life with no meaning, and he realizes that a death without identity would be a waste of his time on earth. His insomnia makes this even worse. In the beginning of the book he feels like a space monkey, and states, “You do the little job you...