Soap for Sartre: Cleansing the
Existential Dilemma in Fight Club
The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
The second rule about fight club is you don 7 talk aboutfight club.
Tyler Durden certainly would not be pleased with all the attention Fight
Club has received since becoming a pop culture phenomenon. In fact, few
literary works in recent memory have been met with as much polarizing
criticism as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Yet, as we pass the tenth anniversary
since the release of David Fincher’s film adaptation, Fight Club continues to
transcend contemporary literary criticism, drawing comparisons to a wealth of
canonical existentialists, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although, Palahniuk’s postmodern style has been viewed as “closer to the
margins than the center of existentialist tradition” (Bennett 77), a structural
analysis of the text reveals that Fight Club, at its core, develops the very same
notions as Sartre’s Existentialism. Combined with its ease of transition into film
and therefore into popular culture, Fight Club proves that a postmodern
approach can and, in fact, does produce an existentialist work worthy of
scholarly attention.
In two of his works, the quintessential existentialist novel Nausea and the
lesser-known short story “Childhood of a Leader,” Sartre imbues his
protagonists, Antoine Roquentin and Lucien Fleurier, respectively, with the
defining characteristics of his philosophy. Together, their stories encompass the
entire timeline of Sartre’s prototypical existentialist, capturing Lucien’s
evolution from childhood to manhood and continuing with Roquentin’s journey
from midlife and beyond. Structurally Fight Club's protagonist lies somewhere
between the two, filled with Roquentin’s nausea, yet still a “30 year old boy” at
heart, as we find Lucien.
As Fight Club begins, the protagonist’s dilemma materializes in the form of
sleep-deprivation: “Three weeks and I hadn’t slept. Three