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existential angst. Likewise, those who join Fight Club and graduate to Project
Mayhem ultimately undergo the same existential cleansing process.
What’s more is the process by which the soap is made. The most important
ingredient is human fat, “liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in
America. The richest, fattest thighs in the world” (150). After a tedious process
of boiling and skimming, the finished product materializes into soap, sold at
twenty dollars a bar for the Paper Street Soap Company. The fact that this soap
made from human fat can also represent the idea that the solution to existential
angst is already found within oneself. Everything that the protagonist needs in
order to get over his problem is already within him vis-a-vis his own self
commitment and action. Following his excruciating encounter with lye (a
chemical bum), the protagonist carries around a constant reminder of the
importance of soap in the form of a kiss-shaped scar on his hand. Again, as
Tyler puts it, “Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand" (75).
With their soap production at its height, the Paper Street Soap Company
becomes the financial driving force behind Project Mayhem. And for their big
climax—blowing up civilization to create something better—soap again is at the
core. With a re-writing of history in his plans, Tyler proclaims, “With enough
soap you could blow up the whole world” (73). This iiberdestructive vision for
soap reveals the breadth of its reach within the narration. In order to “blow up
the world” and start anew, soap is the catalyst. It’s precisely this imagery facing
the protagonist as he breaks away from his now realized Doppelganger in Tyler,
effectively blowing up his own world. This coup de grace of sorts marks a new
beginning, which parallels the conclusion of “Childhood of a Leader”: “A clock
struck noon; Lucien rose. The metamorphosis was complete: a graceful,
uncertain adolescent had entered this cafe one hour earlier; now a man left, a
leader among the French” (144). Just as the clock strikes noon for Lucien, Fight
Club's protagonist finds himself at the midway point of his own life.
From his insomnia and IKEA lifestyle to the support groups to the eventual
rise and fall of his commitment in Fight Club and Project Mayhem, the
protagonist undergoes the typical Sartrean existentialist journey: angst followed
by a quest for meaning, and action and commitment followed by a new sense of
self and purpose. This syntagmatic parallel reveals that despite the drastic
differences in the paradigms—instead of the public park and chestnut trees
found in Nausea, there is a dilapidated building on Paper Street and homemade
soap—Palahniuk’s underlying philosophy echoes that of Sartre’s existentialism.
And so, like Lucien Fleurier and Antoine Roquentin who preceded him, Fight
Club's protagonist will live on in existential lore, freshly scrubbed with Paper
Street soap.
University of Virginia
Joshua Mason
Bibliography
Bennett, Robert. “The Death of Sisyphus: Existential Literature and the Cultural Logic in