'another old Buddhist monastery thing”: The Misguided Zen of Fight Club
Though Fight Club has received a surprising amount of scholarly attention centering on
issues such as masculinity, trauma, anarchy, and the narrator’s existential crisis since the
novel’s publication in 1996, only one scholar to date has explored either the novel or the
subsequent film (1999) through a Buddhist lens. In “Fight Club: An Exploration of Buddhism,”
Charley Reed argues that the film uis truly a Zen Buddhism parable, telling the story of an
every-man who though imprisoned in a life of suffering, desires to find enlightenment and
peace” (par. 11). While I agree here with Reed, I stop short in accepting his suggestion that the
narrator is doing so “in the mold of Siddhartha Gautama" (par. 1). Reed’s overarching
approach centers more on “transposing" (Reed’s term) Buddhist concepts rather than
expanding upon those in the work itself. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Buddhism is a little
more self-evident in the novel than in the film; whatever the reason, though, Reed’s
assessment leaves his readers wanting a more in-depth analysis of what the characters
themselves are doing and saying concerning Buddhism. I propose here, then, that the driving
force behind the narrator’s dual personality and attendant violence is best examined through
the Buddhist concepts of samsSra (the world of suffering), shunyatd (emptiness), and paticca
samuppada (nondualism), all three of which are explored in the novel itself. Further, counter to
Reed’s argument that the narrator achieves enlightenment, I suggest he merely glimpses
prajhSpSramita (the perfection of insight) on an intellectual level when shown compassion
(karunS) and wisdom (prajhd) at the novel’s conclusion by people who, due to terminal
illnesses, have embraced their own impermanence.
The Buddhist notion of samsSra—the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth sentient beings
traverse until reaching enlightenment— is caused by the delusion that we each see ourselves
as “a beautiful and unique snowflake,” as the novel puts it (126). It is this very notion of a
unique and individual self which Buddhism and Fight Club calls into question. The narrator
manifests Tyler Durden, his dynamic doppelganger, as a sort of Zen master whose job is to
instruct him about the concepts of emptiness and nondualism through his words and actions.
According to Francisco Collado-Rodriguez, Palahniuk’s early novels employ “teaching
characters” such as Tyler, Brandy (Invisible Monsters, 1999), and Ida (Choke, 2001) who
teach the narrators and “the common reader, allegedly trapped by the forces of consumerism,
5