Bad Faith, Finitude, and Meaning in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
Item
- Description
- Soap. It is used to wash our hands, wash our bodies, and clean almost everything. According to Tyler Durden, one of the main protagonists in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, soap is a bi-product of human sacrifice and destruction. It is through destruction of the material world that Durden cleanses himself. Though the novel pulls its reader through a whirlwind of violence, it also reveals a passageway for ridding ourselves of the sickness of social conformity. In essence, the text offers the soap for our current generation. In this paper, I utilize the existential concepts of bad faith, meaning, and finitude to uncover how the main character in Fight Club creates meaning in his life through destruction. However, I argue that the message of the novel is ultimately hopeful. It challenges readers not to limit themselves, rather, to seek out meaning through accepting responsibility for one's own life.
- Brian Kanouse
- Contributor
- Keene State College
- Creator
- Trisha Beringer
- Date
- 2015-04-11
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12088/7547
- Language
- en_US
- Subject
- Arts and Humanities
- Philosophy
- Type
- Presentation
- Rights
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
- Item sets
- AEC 2015 Humanities
- Site pages
- Humanities
Position: 1064 (64 views)