Fight Club

The story flashes-back an indeterminate amount of time. The Narrator attends a support group meeting for survivors of testicular cancer, despite never having had the condition. He attends this support group, and several others for illnesses he does not have, so that he has a space to cry. Now, however, the Narrator cannot cry because there is a woman attending the meeting watching him, and he is afraid she knows he is a faker. The Narrator began attending terminal illness support groups two years previously to self-treat his insomnia, after his doctor did not seem to take him seriously.

The Narrator recalls his very first meeting. At Above and Beyond, he met Chloe, a woman who has fatal brain parasites and simply wants to have sex one more time before she dies. The meeting consists largely of guided meditation in which participants walk up a hill to a palace. The palace has seven doors, and the meditation leader talks the group through opening each door, clearing a corresponding chakra, and meeting their “power animal.” The Narrator’s power animal is a penguin.

After meditation, the group partners off. The pairs hug and cry together. At his first group meeting, the Narrator could not cry because he was too exhausted from his insomnia. He began attending more groups for different terminal illnesses. The first time the Narrator attended Remaining Men Together (the testicular cancer support group), he met Bob. Bob is a former bodybuilder, and he used to take steroids. Now Bob is much heavier and has fluid trapped in his pectorals, giving him what the Narrator calls “bitch tits” (22). When Bob hugs him at his first Remaining Men Together meeting, the Narrator cries into Bob’s chest. That night he is finally able to sleep.

Now, the Narrator’s insomnia has returned, prompted by the arrival of Marla Singer at many of the same support groups he attends. The Narrator cannot cry in front of Marla because he knows that she knows he is lying about his health, and so he decides to confront her at the following night at Above and Beyond, the brain parasite group.

Tyler Durden works as a banquet waiter and as a movie projectionist at night, and he can only work night jobs because he is a “night person.” The Narrator can only work a day job because he is a “day person.” The Narrator frequently flies for his job, and he fantasizes about being in a plane crash. He describes how Tyler switches film reels in a projection booth, and the processes needed to ensure a seamless transition. Tyler must watch the corner of the screen for “cigarette burns,” which are white marks used to indicate the end of a reel. The first white dot signals two minutes remaining, while the second white dot is a five-second warning. Tyler collects single frames from pornographic movies and splices them into family films. He does this with every film, on every shift. No one in the audience realizes what they have seen, but they become upset or ill and cannot figure out why.

The Narrator finds the “tiny life” of his constant traveling to be charming, from “single-serving butter” in his airplane meal to a “single-use toothbrush” in his hotel room (28). The Narrator calls his airline seat partners his “single-use” friends (31). He works for an automotive company, and his job is to apply a formula to determine the costs of initiating a recall for a faulty vehicle, as well as the cost of settling damages lawsuits with families affected by an accident in a faulty vehicle. If the settlement costs run higher than a recall would, the company recalls the car, presumably preventing future accidents. But if the recall is more expensive than the projected settlement costs, then the company does not recall the vehicle.

The Narrator recalls meeting Tyler Durden while on vacation at a nude beach. He fell asleep on the beach and woke up to see Tyler arranging driftwood logs in the sand. For a few minutes, Tyler sat ins amongst the standing logs, and then he went for a swim. As Tyler was leaving the beach, the Narrator asks what Tyler was doing while he was asleep. Tyler shows the Narrator that the driftwood he arranged cast a shadow of a giant hand on the beach. Although the image is now distorted, at 4:30pm the shadow had been a perfect likeness. Tyler says that “a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort” (33). Tyler gives the Narrator his phone number, and they become friends.

At Above and Beyond, the Narrator and Marla watch one another. A newcomer to the meeting turns out to be Chloe’s sister, and she tells the group that Chloe has died. The Narrator becomes angrier as the meeting continues. The last time he saw Chloe, she said she was no longer afraid of death; now that she has died, he cannot appreciate what a beautiful thing her death should be because Marla is constantly watching him. The Narrator sees Marla behind every door of the palace in guided meditation, and instead of meeting a penguin, he sees Marla.

When the group partners off, the Narrator picks Marla. He pins her arms to her sides and pulls her in close. He tells her she is a liar, and that she needs to leave because he needs these groups. Marla says that if he exposes her as a fraud, she will expose him, and then they will both have nothing. The Narrator suggests that they split the support groups, taking three groups each and alternating attendance. Marla considers the offer but refuses, though during the meeting’s closing prayer, she agrees to let the Narrator have the Remaining Men Together group for himself.

On the Narrator’s flight home from Dulles, his suitcase is seized by police because it was vibrating, and they suspected it contained a bomb (it was only his electric razor). When he returns home, he discovers that the apartment he has lived in for the past three years has been destroyed by an explosion that sent all his material possessions falling 15 floors to the ground. The Narrator makes a mental catalog of everything he lost in the explosion, naming the brands and designers of each item and recalling how each item fit into his vision of his home.

The police think the explosion was caused by a gas leak. The Narrator speaks with the doorman, who tells him that the police have not officially ruled out arson. All that remains of the apartment is its concrete shell; some of the fallen furniture badly damaged the Narrator’s car. The Narrator calls Tyler, who rents a house on Paper Street. Tyler meets the Narrator at a bar, and they get drunk together. Tyler agrees to let the Narrator move in with him on one condition: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” (46).