1. Precis: “Men and nostalgia for violence...”
In the novel Fight Club, men struggle to find their true masculinity. Many struggle with issues
that caused them to feel vulnerable. Fight club is a club invented by the narrator and Tyler. The idea of
the club is to experience fighting because that is something many men in the book, relate to manhood.
The men in the book decide to have a club in which you fight other than men. The point is not to win or
lose but only to experience a fight and soon lead to manhood. Reasons that the men in the book feel
vulnerable is the lack of a male role model in life. Many didn't experience having a father making them
feel feminine and weak.
Males today need a male role model whether it is there father or just someone to look up to.
Males need someone to show them morals. I disagree with the fact that many men feel that violence is
the gateway to manhood. The book shows what those men went through to just get a taste of manhood.
Whether it was suicide or fighting or whatever else it might be, men would do it to feel like a man or to
just be seen as a man.
During that time period feminism was strong causing a lot of nonviolence. Some men, such as
the men in the book, percieved masculinity as violence. There is also a group od men who feel like the
lost their identity because of the change in culture. Men sometimes feel like their power in the world is
shrinking, causing men to feel vulnerable. They get a need for finding ways to gain their masculinity
back. This is show in the novel when there were fights just for experience.
In other cases some of the men in the novel suffered illness that stretches from mental to
physical. Big Bob, a character in the book, was an example of a physical illness. He was a user of
steriods to look and feel manly but later caused him to experience the opposite. He eventually reached
a state in which he contracted testical cancer which lead to the loss of his tesicals making him feel like
a player in the fight for masculinity because he also developed women parts due to hormones causing
him to feel bad about himself. The narrator was experiencing another issue that was caused by his lack
of confidence. The narrator experienced a more mental illness known as insomnia and would attend
many sessions for ill and injured people to make himself feel better about his condition. The narrator
would attend them to see people in the world who were experiencing worse complications than him, so
he could feel sorry for them and feel better about himself.
Overall, during the time period in which Fight Club took place many men struggled
witht their masculinity and felt that fighting and other unecessary violence would help them
gain back what they “lost.” The rise of feminism was huge and caused men to get confused and
lose what they thought of as their identity. Palahnuik writes about the mental and physical
problems that caused men to think that or problems that arose from the change of role. The
narrator finds his role model as Tyler and wants Tyler to teach him to be a man. The narrator
put himself lower because of having no role model and the only way for the narrator to feel
confident is to find a way to either see others suffering more or to feel like a man.