Soap for Sartre
93
“Maybe one night in the tunnel, robbers came and took papa and mama and put
those two in their place” (86). The lack of a real attachment, even one as basic as
parent-son, will define Lucien, whom we later find “acting” in his own roles,
throughout the entire narrative structure. Like Roquentin and Lucien, the
protagonist of Fight Club struggles to find something to which to be attached,
thereby exacerbating his existential dilemma. As Sartre later writes in Being and
Nothingness, “the self [...] is in a perpetual mode of detachment from what is”
(72-73). Moreover, the ephemeral nature of his cross-country trips leads to a
microstructure of “single-serving” friends and “tiny friendships,” which
ironically ends with one “single-use friend” saying: “I hope you make your
connection” (31). The choice of the word “connection” is a propos as it not only
connects him back to his reality vis-a-vis his job but also to an attachment,
which he eventually finds in Tyler Durden.
In attempting to find solutions to the problems that characterize his
existential dilemma, the protagonist first turns to support groups. The first of
these, Remaining Men Together (a group in a “church basement full of men”
suffering or recovering from testicular cancer), provides the framework upon
which the later Fight Club is built (16). By surrounding himself with “real pain,”
as his doctor suggests, the protagonist is able to revert back to a child-like
euphoria, namely, in the enormous bosom of Bob, a former “juicer” whose
breasts have swollen to gargantuan proportions “the way we think of God’s as
big” (16). Nestled between Bob’s matemalistic breasts,