Picking up on the thread that started with Paz yesterday and continued through with Fight Club today--
1. The issue of nameless narrators--which other narrator is he like?
2. How does the narrator want to reach/touch the center of his wave?
3. How is the essence of Tyler Durden distilled into little pieces of ice and put into people's drinks?
Think about Mamet's essay, "Secret Names"
"Names are powerful...but anything called a relationship must eventually result in sorrow, as the participants are willing to examine its name and nature."
On Monday you have one blog entry due--you can either write on one of these questions OR you can answer one of the three questions located on the top of the handout I passed out on Thursday.
Lastly, I will post the Kiefer extra credit assignment on the blog by the end of the day today, and I will also post a basic, albeit basic, blueprint for our plan of attack for next week.
18 comments:
OK. So I was cruising this blog again to see what has been happening. Great stuff. Then I see that Mr. K has assigned the Mamet essay that we read in Journalism class from our Pushcart Reader! Another area of overlap. Synchronicity is awesome. Carry on!
I'm going for #2 this time.
I'm going to pretend that I haven't seen the whole movie, and answer it based only on knowledge that I would have known from the segment we watched in class.
The narrator is trying to find himself in the wave. In the beginning, he is always buying furniture, which is how he defines himself. To him, this is what makes him complete, but yet he still can't sleep. This is why he goes to the support groups, because here he can let go of his pride and just cry, because "losing all hope was freedom". He uses this to try to enter the wave, especially through the therapy in the cancer group where he enters the cave and finds the power animal (the penguin) who tells him to "slide". What he is trying to tell himself is that he needs to take action instead of just standing there. He needs to slide.
Then He meets Marla: her lie reflects his, and he knows he can't use this method to reach into the wave anymore, because she is disgusting to him. At the same time, when he tries to enter his cave again, she is the one telling him to slide. Although he claims to hate her, because she is at the center, it is clearly the opposite. "It would heal if you could stop tonguing it, but you can't". He is unable to stop thinking about Marla, and cannot accept that she fits within his wave and is at his center. He's not ready to accept these things yet.
After this, is the scene where he keeps waking up in different places. "If you wake up in a different place and a different time, could you wake up as a different person?" What the narrator needs to do is to wake up as a different person in order to reach the center of his wave. Then he finds Tyler and loses his apartment. Confiding in Tyler, we find out that the narrator believes that he was "close to being complete" because of the possessions in that apartment, but by going with Tyler, and by fighting and willingly accepting pain, he is freeing himself and reaching inside deeper at the same time. This is part of realizing that he was nowhere near close to being complete from possessions. He will stop fitting into the mould of the "house with condiments and no food".
Option 3 on the paper:
I think there's a point where both of them go against these theories but for the most part they follow these roles. Tyler lives in this run down house where it seems he just found and decided to start living there which is an impulse thing to do. When the narrator is with Tyler all they seem to do is fight and do random things such as play golf and ride a bicycle about the house. I think as our narrator continues to live with Tyler, he'll slowly start to adapt to this thinking and leave his Ego ways behind. I can see him quitting work and just doing Tyler's random jobs.
Our narrator, before meeting Tyler, had a more Ego way of living. He had a place to live that was actually livable and a steady job. However, I don't think that was enough for him. He needed something more exciting to his life, which is why he couldn't sleep. He started to go to support groups to help him but in the end I don't think that's what he needed. Although, it's a good thing to live life according to what's reality: the Ego way, I think our narrator needed a little Id to be able to sleep.
However, I don't think our narrator is going to do a good job of balancing these two ideas. I think after meeting Tyler and living his lifestyle, he's going to conform and live completely on impulse. I don't really understand how logically Tyler is capable of living. I mean I don't think his soap is a big seller and it doesn't look like he works a lot with his movie thing so this makes me ponder.
I think that a person needs all 3 things in order to be able to live a functional life and as Tyler and our narrator become closer they loose the order two and just keep the Id. So I don't think this is going to end well.
I have never seen this movie so this idea may seem far-fetched. Assuming that Tyler is not a real person, but only a figment of the narrator’s imagination or his Id, it seems plausible that the narrator could then be the ego. As we meet the narrator, who remains nameless for the obvious reason that he represents a universal character, it is immediately clear that he lives through his things, all of the expensive mass-produced furniture in his home and his wardrobe consisting of designer apparel. At this point the narrators life seems dominated by the superego, he decorates his home and clothes himself in order to fit in with society. According to the handout, as the narrator’s superego begins to gain strength, he begins to loose recognition of his Id, and his needs. The narrators insomnia and lack of self-fulfillment seems only coaxed by his attendance at support groups, only until he meets Marla. At this point I am also going to assume that Marla is not real, considering the ridiculous nature of her character and the fact that she is seen repeatedly crossing busy roads, even standing in the middle of them without getting hit or beeped at. The introduction of Marla into the narrator’s life represents his sudden recognition of the pathetic deceiving acts he is partaking in just in order to sleep at night. If she is present at a support group, he fails to sleep. Almost immediately after his awareness of Marla, he meets Tyler, a salesman of soap. It only seems necessary that he sell soap, as the narrator starts the cleansing process once they are introduced. As he becomes reacquainted with his Id, he begins to sleep again, lowering his judgements and giving into his needs. Less aware of the world around him, the narrator begins to focus on his relationship with Tyler (his Id) and himself. As Tyler tells the narrator at the bar, “the things you own end up owning you,” the process of change begins. While Tyler sits in the bathtub talking to the narrator, he starts the conversation asking who he would want to fight, slowly bringing the conversation to a point where he is forced to talk about his family and where he came from, subconsciously re-evaluating his life. It seems that the time with Tyler is almost always spent re-creating himself, whether it be physically fighting, or hitting golf-balls off of nearby buildings the narrator starts to do things for himself, feeding his id and in turn, bringing down his level of superego.
This all connects with Borges idea of the three worlds. Fight club, as far as I can tell, is the story of every man, struggling to find a healthy balance between his id, ego, and superego. For the narrator, his third world is his world with Tyler, his second world is his world of possessions and his job, and his third world is his world within the support groups and Marla. As the first two worlds only lead him to depression, insomnia and self-destruction, the narrator brings himself into a third world in which he is able to work through all of the obstacles, which never fail to get in his way. In this third world he is strong, he doesn’t care about his boss, his things or his position within the world. In this place he changes the focus back on himself in order to reconnect with his id and change the status of his life which is run primarily by his superego.
Just so there is some clarity here, anytime I write The Narrator (both words capitalized) I am referring to the Fight Club character (Edward Norton plays him).
We’ve talked about how a nameless narrator makes a story universal, because the lack of a name leaves the reader open to determine who exactly is speaking. In most cases, this nameless narrators becomes a written incarnation of ourselves. In “Fight Club,” Director Dave Fincher literally shows this in a visual form with Edward Norton’s character (The Narrator). The Narrator adopts a different name, and a different tragedy, at each of his self-help meetings, mimicking how we adopt a different persona as we fill the place of the nameless narrators in our stories. However, when we initially embark in the stories we read, there is still a sense of anonymity, since we aren’t familiar with the territory we are about to cover. This allows us as readers to ignore some of our own identity, because we are focused on adapting ourselves to the certain situation written down in front of us.
The Narrator does this as well, because as he slaps on a “Hello, my name is: __________” sticker, he pushes he true identity (which we don’t know, providing the hint that he doesn’t know it, either) in order to focus on the new scenario he has to adapt to. When we read these stories, and when The Narrator attends his meetings, we are essentially becoming a character, because we aren’t entirely ourselves. On a literal level, we are not in the same position as the narrator in a story like Araby: a priest didn’t die in the back room of our house, we are not entranced by Magnan’s sister, etc. But, we can relate to the underlying theme of growing up. Just the same, The Narrator can’t literally relate to the feeling of having testicular cancer, but he finds comfort in the overwhelming sense of despair he encounters at his meetings.
Due to The Narrator’s fascination with heartbreak and misfortune, I find him very much like the narrator in Notes from Underground, who begins his notes with the thought: “I am a sick man…a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts. But actually, I don’t know a damn thing about my illness” (1). This association of mental illness with physical illness is like The Narrator; though he doesn’t find himself sick, he does see the relief of placing his sickness on a temporary ailment. In an earlier blog entry I wrote about how pain was the universal language, and the support group meetings accurately represent this. The meetings are random in nature, a chance gathering of several suffering strangers, yet a whimper and a tear brings unlikely pairs into a strong bond.
From what we’ve seen so far, The Narrator’s relationship with Marla Singer is somewhat relatable to that of the Notes narrator and Liza. Though the defiant Marla is much different than the passive Liza, both our undoubtedly lost, and try and “find” themselves through a mirror image, whose depravity will only lead both parties into more dead ends.
I’m going to write on question 1-
I think that our narrator is nameless, yet again, because it makes him more useful to us. Leaving the protagonist nameless makes us create his background and create his being. We only know what our narrator tells us, the rest is left up to us to create. I think that we may also want to point out that his job is also nameless. There are all these clues but no definite solution. This makes this narrator so useful to the viewer. We can easily put ourselves in their position and it’s so more personal and intimate. At the point we are at in the movie our nameless character is much like that character in The Crack-Up. That narrator remains nameless but seems much like our narrator in Fight club. Both narrators are lost and have been through there own sort of journey that has led them to nothing. “There is another sort of blow that comes from within- that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.” Our narrator has always had things set up for him and things seem better then they really are, hence him going to those group things. In The Crack-Up our narrator went through a sort of different journey but both journeys have left both nameless characters at a dead end. The situations that both narrators have gone through could easily be anyone of us, that’s why through it all the narrators remain nameless. So we can place ourselves in their shoes and in their thoughts.
The Narrator in Fight Club shares many of the same constricting walls as the Narrator in Notes from Underground. The Narrator, thus far, struggles to find stability in the difficulties of society, his failure to communicate, material items, and his seemingly indifference towards life. Through his insomnia, the Narrator is able to realize all that plagues his mind and body, both physically and emotionally. The lack of sleep takes a visible toll on the Narrator as he goes through the motions of his life in a mindless and lifeless daze. The Narrator’s doctor does not prescribe him sleeping pills, which forces the Narrator to find his own therapy. Ironically, the therapy that the Narrator finds comfort in is in the pain of others, similar to the Narrator in Notes. Our Narrator is drawn to support groups; they give him an opportunity to cry and show some sort of emotion, which he has been void of for so long. However, this is not the best way for the Narrator to deal with his limiting walls.
The Narrator meets the mysterious Tyler Durden. Tyler encourages the Narrator to “Fuck off with your sofa units and stripe green patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.” Tyler opens up an entirely different world for our Narrator. He introduces the Narrator to an Underground. The two unlikely friends begin to fight late one night. This violent yet therapeutic fighting seems to be the start of setting the Narrator free from the walls that are suffocating him. Although we have not gotten much further past the first few fight scenes, it is clear that the Narrator holds an air of invincibility ever since he began to fight.
I can’t say for sure how this movie is going turnout. I think that the Narrator is going to completely break through the walls that hold him back through his fighting and his friendship with Tyler. Thus far, the Narrator’s realization of his problems has enabled him to understand that there is a way out. Now, it is only a question of how far he will take his fighting in order to free himself completely.
The narrator in Fight Club and the narrator in My Life With The Wave both attempt to find their identity in the outside world. The narrator of Fight Club searches for his identity through support groups and material possessions, while the narrator of My Life in the Wave looks towards a woman. The failure of both narrators to find their identity comes from their failure to look inwards. As the narrator from Fight Club continues to looks towards the outside world, he carries on the process of distilling and cutting up his own inner being and becoming just a byproduct of the outside world.
One of the ways the narrator of Fight Club attempts to find his identity is through material possessions. He has an obsession with filling his apartment with more and more items, yet it never seems to reach completion. After the fire, he commented on how he had almost achieved the perfect wardrobe, but not quite. I don’t think that perfect wardrobe is ever something the narrator could have achieved if he continued to live the way he was. Adding to his wardrobe was his method of finding identity, yet since he could never actually find identity through his wardrobe, the wardrobe could never be completed.
Another attempt the narrator makes to find his identity in the outside world is through the support groups, where he hides under both a fake name and fake diseases. In these groups, he observes other people spill their inner self and imitates it. In imitating their actions, he is tricking himself into thinking that he is on his way to finding himself. He becomes addicted to this, just as he is addicted to consumerism. He searches for the key to his inner being through both of his addictions (material possessions and support groups), yet never finds the true key, only imitations, because the key is within him.
The only disease the narrator of Fight Club does actually have is insomnia, which shows his inability to reside within himself. Sleep is a state where the outside world is blocked out, and you live in your dreams. However, since the narrator lives only in the outside world, he cannot enter the inner world of sleep. In Fight Club, insomnia was described as everything feeling like a copy. Insomniacs fail to enter the inner world and live only in the outside world where everything is a copy, including the insomniac himself. The narrator searches for himself within this world, so he essentially becomes this world; a copy of the outside world. He is being “distilled into little pieces of ice and then put into people’s drinks” on his own doing. In continuing to search for his existence in these support groups and his material possessions, he is distilling his own being and just becoming a copy. Later on in the movie, insomnia is described as never really being asleep but also never really awake. The narrator is never really asleep because he can’t enter his inner self, but this also prevents him ever being fully awake, because the inner self is necessary to be able to fully go through life in the outer world.
In contrast to the narrator, Tyler represents someone who is completely comfortable in his own skin and doesn’t need to look to the outside world to gauge his identity. Tyler’s world isn’t dominated by the Superego, but he lives based on his inner nature. The fact that he is a soap-salesmen, show not only that he is free from pollution of the outside world, but also indicates that he is willing to sell to people a way to cleanse themself. He is someone who can help people find their inner being. When he hands the narrator the business card, he is making him an offer to help him find his inner key. Later on, in the bathtub scene the narrator finally begins to open up and look inside himself. It’s symbolic that this occurs in the bathtub, because of the connection to soap. He is now beginning to cleanse himself with the help of the soaps-salesmen, so that he can see clearly within himself to find his inner key.
The narrator in Fight Club is a lot like the narrator in Notes from Underground. In Notes, the narrator has to travel inward, into his mind and be a man of thought before he is one of action. He must travel inward in order to produce something outward, his writing, to find himself and relieve himself from inner turmoil due to his thoughts. Through the outward act he can finally be relieved/at peace more because he is releasing what has been bottled up inside him. The narrator in Fight Club also travels inward wondering who he really is. Traveling from support group to support group, being absorbed by insomnia and basically lost in oblivion; he needs an out. He needs something which will let him release all of this. Tyler opens up this opportunity for him. By fighting, he releases it all. His thoughts, frustration, everything, can be taken out during the bare fist fighting which begins with Tyler one night.
Both are narrators which the reader can relate to because, as discussed in class, they are nameless in order to be universal. The reader can understand the frustration of each because everyone has experienced it at one time or another. Has experienced the contridicitons of everyday life, the feeling of being lost in oblivion, of not knowing who you are or where you are even though you're stuck in the everyday routine you have been for some period of time in your life. Both the book and the movie speak to the reader/viewer and say that there is a way out. Things can get better. Action just needs to take place in order to try and make it better. Both narrators parallel on this concept.
**narrators only refered to as he because it's one less letter to type than she, since it's universal it could also be female**
Hmm it didn't post mine for some reason. Hopefully this time it will work!
NUMBER 2 (with a dash of Number 1 from the handout)
A predominating theme of novels we read in American Literature last year was the illusive quest for the American Dream. The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath immediately come to mind as novels that proved this dream, of rags-to-riches and buying happiness through hard work, is merely a myth. Fight Club's themes seem to be following in this vein with the narrator's lifestyle in the beginning of this movie. He's followed the rules of American society, but an infatuation with materialism has left him restless and dissatisfied. He thinks that, somehow, if he can make his apartment and his wardrobe look like they are out of a catalogue, he will be complete; he tries to reach his "center" through these inanimate objects. Yet as his insomnia proves, this method is not working.
The narrator finds emotional release in support groups, where anonymity gives him freedom to expose himself. Due to his jet setting lifestyle and possibly for some reasons from his past that the audience is not privy to, our narrator clearly has problem establishing meaningful relationships. He has tried to substitute his things for these connections, but they don't work -- he needs real human contact to become in touch with his true emotions.
I think there's something much deeper at work, however, in the narrator's addiction to support groups. It has to do with how society, American society in particular but perhaps all society as well, does not condone males expressing their emotions. Men are supposed to be strong and tough, they aren't allowed to cry or talk about their feelings. The narrator' dry delivery and his emotionless attitude at work all speak to an inability on his part to express emotion.
The testicular cancer support group shows an attempt to show emotion but still remain men.. Yet these men are not only emotionally "emasculated" when they discuss their feelings, but they are literally emasculated because of their cancer. Bob, the narrator's support group partner, is even beginning to look like a woman.
So, how can disenchanted men, like the narrator and Tyler, express their emotions their pent up emotions while retaining their masculinity? According to Tyler, it is through fighting. How well this will work remains to be seen.
PS - I agree with several others that the narrator is quite like the narrator of Notes from Underground -- not only is their struggle for acceptance in society quite similar, but also they've both got the whole stream of consciousness thing going on. Even the narrative structures (starting at the end, then working their way backwards) are alike.
This is my response to question number 1 from the handout, the one about the theme of the movie, what that theme says about our society, and how this relates to topics we have discussed in class. So here's my take...
We’ve spent some time this year, as we read world literature and contemplate the people around us and the evils that exist, asking ourselves how we can hear and know about such pain and calmly turn away. Fight Club attacks this dilemma and asks us a question of its own: are we all insomniacs?
We act like we think all of this reality is too much, as if we can’t handle it. We fill our magazines and bold, CAPITALIZED newspaper headlines and daily news shows with descriptions of worldwide suffering because it sells copies and attracts viewers. World pain has not become a cause to fight against, but our entertainment. In Fight Club, when the narrator can’t fall asleep, he visits support groups. He surrounds himself with testicular cancer and blood-born parasites and alcoholism because it puts him to sleep. Just like this narrator, we are calmed when we learn of such suffering and understand that at least we don’t have that particular breed of pain. This notion relaxes us. Once we know this, we can be safely put to sleep. The sad thing is, the embarrassing thing, is that all of this knowledge of everything that is wrong with our world is everything that should keep us awake at night. Testicular cancer and Darfur and school shootings in our backyards should have us tossing and turning beneath the sheets, should rouse us from our dreams in cold sweats. For many, however, the notion of some remote and inconsequential suffering has become a lullaby.
Fight Club not only suggests that sleep is the problem. It centers around the idea that, even when awake, all we want to do is turn away and ignore. Insomniacs want sleep, they crave sleep, but they can’t have sleep. They spend their waking hours in a daze because exhaustion wraps them up and blinds them. So maybe, even when we can’t turn away from a problem in sleep, we don’t run towards it and take action. We stare at it blindly until our vision blurs and noise is drowned out. While pain is had, millions of people around the world turn to watch frozenly and with blank stares, wishing that they could close their eyes and fall asleep.
As I was watching the movie on Friday, I recorded a few of the lines that stood out for me concerning insomnia. “When you’re an insomniac,” the narrator says, “everything is a copy of a copy.” This is blurred vision and distancing working together. “An insomniac is never really asleep and never really awake,” the narrator says. This then suggests that, because we want to sleep but rarely can, we exist in a sort of living limbo where we can really accomplish nothing.
The similarities between this idea of insomnia and our discussion of labyrinths are striking. Each feeds off of confusion and disorientation. Each is discouraging and intimidating. The theme of Fight Club might then be that we have been thinking about labyrinths and dead-ends with faulty assumptions already made. Someone runs into a dead end. They fall down. We have asked ourselves why it is so hard to get back up, to muster up the strength to try a new path, a new idea. What we haven’t considered, however, is that perhaps we don’t want to get up. When we fall down, the labyrinth we live is lost from view. We can’t see it, we can’t hear it, it has nothing to do with us and we have no affect on it or its other people. Fight Club offers the idea that, once we fall down, we’re grateful. We fall down and then we try to shut out the world and its pain while we try to fall asleep.
I chose option #3 that was up on the blog, but I added a lot of small ideas that work with the other topics too.
Director David Fincher uses Tyler Durden character as a device throughout the film. Durden is constructed on purpose to be a character that a viewer can not relate to. He lives a wreckless life as the viewer sees him squatting in a boarded up house and stealing a car. More importantly though, Tyler seems perfectly content with this life as a soap maker and a free spirit. The viewer does not understand how someone could live like Tyler does, but that is exactly what the director was looking to create with this character.
Tyler Durden is a device, he is like an event in life that changes a persons outlook on it. He is a small piece that enters into someone else's life and serves as the key to unlock a much larger sweeping lifestyle change. He is like Paz's ice cube in a glass of life for others. Tyler Durden hates the stereotypical American outlook on life. He hates the idea of settling that we talked about in class a few weeks ago. He does not desire to hurt or kill people, but instead he wants to assist them to see past the blinders that society has put on them.
To our narrator, a man who is suffering from an identity crisis, Tyler Durden is just the person that he needs. Our narrator does not know it yet, but through all of these clinics and problems he is on a quest to discovering his own identity and discovering what Paz would call his center. Throughout his experiences with Durden so far, he has always been open minded and willing to listen to the strange character. The first encounter with Durden on the plane would have been strange to most people except for our narrator, who is going through all of these problems. The narrator does not realize it yet but Tyler is slowly providing him with the outlet to release his confusion, anger, and sadness that is building up in his life.
But it is not just the narrator that Tyler looks to affect. Tyler lives his life to affect a wide array of people. He spreads himself out, like a block of ice chopped into small cubes. He desires to chill and affect as many glasses as he can. He is ever changing like Paz's wave. He can be anyone or do anything because of the way that he has chosen to construct his life.
What is so interesting about Fight Club is that it is aimed also to affect the viewers. We are seeing the film and the world within the film through the eyes of our narrator. We are perceiving events and this entire scenario in the same way that he is. Durden will have the same affect on us that he has on all of the others he tries to help. I cannot wait to see how this develops and the things that I will take away from this movie.
I’m answering question 2—and also I rented the movie and watched some so I could have more to say but I didn’t finish it, and I think just one thing I mention we haven’t watched in class yet.
Throughout the beginning of Fight Club, we see that the Narrator is very much defined by his surroundings and possessions, not content where he is, and certainly hasn’t reached the center of his “wave”. Part of the way he will be able to reach his center is by attending support groups, and being around people who are in a horrible place.
At these support groups, we see people like Bob and Chloe who appear to have reached rock bottom. Something about these groups allows the Narrator to sleep again, and he finally feels, in a sense, alive. He says at these groups, “I let go. Lost in oblivion; dark and silent, and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.” Being around all of these people, with nothing left, and for a moment pretending he was one of those people, is comforting to the Narrator. Every time he attends another meeting, the Narrator becomes freer.
The Narrator also says that, “When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake.” For sixth months he had insomnia, and he was never really asleep or awake, nor was he really living or dead. He wasn’t in a definite place, instead he was caught in the middle of some confusing and unsettling period, no where near the center of his wave. When you lose hope it appears that in a sense, you are dying, but somehow the Narrator finds the ability to be resurrected and get another sense of life whenever he puts himself in this position. Once he lets go and cries at these meetings, he is able to be fully asleep, and fully alive. In the moments when living seems most impossible, the greatest potential for life is available to him.
At one time, after meeting Tyler Durden, Durden says to the Narrator, “First you have to give up. First you have to know, not fear, know, that someday you're gonna die.” At rock bottom, maybe that’s when the Narrator can know instead of fearing that someday he will die. The path of the Narrator towards reaching the center of his wave is his downfall, his path towards rock bottom. This where Tyler comes in, because he represents a rock bottom, and especially owning your rock bottom. At the same time, Durden seems to be more aware of himself than anyone, and he knows who he is. The Narrator wants to hit rock bottom and reach the center of his wave by becoming Tyler Durden. The Narrator’s journey to the center of his wave is like his journey to becoming Tyler Durden. He begins the movie nothing like Durden, materialistic, lost, and fearful, then slowly transforms to be more like him. Durden tells the Narrator to “stop controlling everything and just let go.” He wants the Narrator to be like him as well, to let go of everything and be free, free to be at the lowest of your low and own it. When he stops rejecting his lows, then he will stop being blind to the center of his wave, and it can finally be touched.
So, is it then, at this moment when we hit rock bottom, when we truly discover ourselves? If we never hit this ultimate low, do we never figure ourselves out, or find our center? Owning your rock bottom is the same as knowing, not fearing that some day you will die. When you accept that some day you will die, then you also accept that right now you’re living, and you can fully live at that point. If you own your current situation, no matter how awful it is, then you truly discover yourself. If you never do this, then you keep going on without fully discovering yourself and realizing who you are, and you are never really living life. So I don’t think you can truly find your center unless you hit and accept your ultimate low, which can really be anything and doesn’t need to be something terrible. If you accept it then you make it real, and it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter if it means nothing to anyone else, as long as you let it affect you.
The process of the Narrator finding the center of his wave, and himself, is found through Fight Club, and kind of submitting himself to pain. In one of the scenes that comes later, when Durden puts the lye on the Narrator that is burning his hand, the narrator is screaming in pain and shouting for Tyler to get him some water. Then Tyler says, “Listen, you can run water over your hand and make it worse or...you can use vinegar and neutralize the burn.” This is when Durden tells the narrator to give up and know and not fear that someday he will die. He says “What you’re feeling is premature enlightenment. This is the greatest moment of your life.” Clearly, the narrator doesn’t feel this way and he is in agony, but in some sick way it can be greatest moment of his life if he lets it. If the narrator accepts this pain, stops looking for the water, which is the quick way out, and controls his suffering and eventual death, then he is becoming enlightened. He can now know himself, and reach the center of his wave. When the Narrator reaches the center of his wave, after he hits bottom, he can only go up when he uses this new sense of self realization and acceptance.
Just like with a wound, these low times will leave scars on the Narrator, and a reminder of what he’s been through. This relates to when Durden was trying to get the Narrator to hit him for the first time, and he says, “I don’t want to die without any scars.” These scars are from bad times, often brutal, and leave a permanent mark. By saying this, Durden wants physical signs of what he’s been through, and he wants to die with them because they were a part of his journey and he doesn’t want to forget that. By welcoming and accepting his scars, he’s accepting every part of him and being comfortable with that, which the Narrator needs to do to find the center of his wave.
1. The issue of nameless narrators--which other narrator is he like?
2. How does the narrator want to reach/touch the center of his wave?
3. How is the essence of Tyler Durden distilled into little pieces of ice and put into people's drinks?
There’s the question, I’m sure the answer could follow, but here I am, far from it. Let’s divulge. I love the narrator, the fridge with condiments and no food, is such a telling and beautifully ironic and pathetic, symbol. Maybe the narrator has no center. I’m sure the entire movie will turn out to be a quest for a very meaningful answer of whom he is. But maybe it’s all shit. Maybe, almost defiantly, we’re all empty. We’re all condiments and accessories that others will try on, but really most of us are no meal. There is no satisfying center or meaningful core.
Maybe our unnamed narrator really can be defined simply as a man who can not sleep, who also happens to collect furniture, and cry on the breasts of men named generic things like Bob. I can identify completely with the narrator in this moment. I am pessimistic and find my self lacking the ability to sleep. I narrate dark thoughts within my head, pretending I understand completely the reasons for my odd actions, and I try to define myself by the squalor of my living quarters. I imagine that the particular way that pens and papers are strewn about the floor must be some key to a greater meaning. We are all stupid. I take that back, we are all in denial.
We believe that we know ourselves, but subconsciously we all harbor a secret selfish thought that there is more to ourselves than even we can understand. We are complicated. We are special. We are not special, we are only as complicated as we sometimes fail to pretend to be. You understand yourself. Deep down, I know exactly why I hate myself and exactly why I can’t sleep. But like our narrator I will wall off this reason, trapping truth in a box just tight enough to almost contain its utter blandness and wretchedness.
Back to the answer.. Perhaps our narrator, of no name or many names, is not trying to reach his center, perhaps he has discovered it, and decided the penguin to be too bland and instead of reaching in to discover, he is breaking into his own “center” and graffiting it simply to make it more interesting. So my pessimistic answer of the night, 1. The nameless narrator is like every other narrator we have seen before, conceited and comfortable in denial. We all secretly treasure our undergrounds. 2. The narrator does not want to reach the center of his wave, wether it is his own center or another’s, he prefers to pretend it to be more complex. 3. I don’t really care about Tyler Durden, to be honest I love his really old dilapidated house, but the metaphor of being cut into pieces does yet seem to apply. I could make it apply, but currently I would prefer not to.
Im sorry for the tone of this entry, I hope I disagree with it by morning. Headaches and sleep deprivation do odd things to a person’s psyche.
hello, first i'd like to apologize for the lateness of this entry. I got home at 1 this morning from NEPSSAC meet and yeah.... i'm doing question #2
In the beginning it seemed the narrator didn't know how to get in touch of his wave. I think he had sorta given up and was just going through the motions. I think he realized that it was a pretty miserable existence. That's what kept him up all night: just the thought that there was something more and he was just ignoring it.
Then he started living vicariously through other people (the people at the help group). Seeing other peopling finding their own "wave," i think, sorta made it feel like he was finding his own too. Seeing the pain of others made him feel like he was real (emo). I think the mundaneness of his life made him feel emotionless, useless, a waste of life. Sadly pain and the sharing of pain is what makes us human. Well maybe not just pain, but emotion, sharing what we feel is what gives us meaning. The narrator lacked this, not just someone to share it with, but the emotion itself. So seeing other people in pain sorta gives him a false sense of meaning. Seeing other people trying to heal their pain, i.e. finding their wave, makes it seem like he is too.
Finally tho, it is fighting that is the key to finding himself. No longer is the pain he feels that of someone else, it his own. Physical pain is what leads him to emotional salvation (emo). The physical pain of the fist gives way to an emotional feeling of life.
This is a very emo way to look at this, i know, but I think its also pretty real. I think to live a life of just accepting things and letting them blow over you is not life. Embrace the pain, physical or emotional. Embrace it and live.
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