초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Among contemporary American novels, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is one of the interesting examples that present the USA in crisis in both dramatic and shocking ways. As many people have pointed out, crisis has become one of the key terms succinctly defining the present condition of the USA that has been put in serious pitfalls in economy, politics, culture and so on. In Fight Club, his most popular work that has been accepted with cult-like enthusiasm, Chuck Palahniuk brings up issue of white masculinity in decline to focus on the dilemma of the individual who gets lost in consumer capitalist American society. The dilemma is presented through a kind of psychopathic drama of two juxtaposed males,the narrator and Tyler Durden, who turns out the narrator’s alter-ego. It is Tyler who guides the narrator to violence as a way of breaking away from the numbed life in the dominant order of capitalism and further constructing a new world in which those who have been oppressed regain genuine selfhood and freedom. But Tyler is someone who the narrator must necessarily overcome for the revolution of self, as well. As shown through Project Mayhem in particular, Tyler’s fascist enterprise of subverting the capitalist system repeats the very oppressive dominant order that the narrator tries to subvert. After an overview of the significance that Fight Club has in regard to the issues of the USA in crisis, this paper concretely examines the overall process in which the narrator struggles to be redeemed from dehumanizing capitalism. In so doing, as the narrator’s decision to hold the terrorist project suggests at the end of the novel, it explores the paradox of revolution, that is, the impossible possibility of revolution that revolution could be possible because it is impossible now.
