DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What kind of narrative/narrator is this?

2. Where is the story set?

CHAPTER 1
3. What does it mean that Tyler says, “the first step to eternal life is you have to die” (11)?

4. What is the tone and what effect does it have when the narrator describes the physics of a gunshot and a silencer?
nitroglycerin? napalm? what affect do the ingredients used in napalm have on the readers’ reception of it? How do
the narrator’s long and detailed descriptions of bombs, etc. affect us?

5. What is the significance of the reference to “space monkeys”? What does it suggest we—everyman—are in the
grand scheme of things? “You do the little job your trained to do…you don’t understand any of it, and then you just
die”

6. What affect does it have on the readers’ reception/understanding of Project Mayhem that it has ‘committees’ such as
the “Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem”?

7. Why does Tyler want to blow the building up? What contemporary social anxiety does this reveal? What does the
destruction of the building symbolize?

8. What comparison/parallel does the statement “Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?” (15) make?

9. Does the narrator survive the explosion of the Parker-Morris Building?

CHAPTER 2
10. The narrator attends “support groups”: what pervasive social anxieties does this action explore/exploit?

11. In his exposition of the support group, the narrator comments, “This is when I’d cry because right now, your life
comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion” (17). How does this contrast with the previously stated
goal of ‘legend’ and ‘live forever’? What theme is being developed here?

12. How is Marla introduced?

13. The narrator describes his injuries as “the bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed” (19); what do his choice of
descriptions and metaphors reveal to the reader about his internal being?

14. What does his choice of his power animal reveal to reader?

15. What social commentary does Bob’s past reveal?

16. What is the irony of Bob’s past with his present medical condition?

17. What theme is being explored when the narrator states: “this was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom” (22)?

18. What allusion is being made when the narrator states “every evening I died and every morning I was born.
Resurrected.” (22)?

CHAPTER 3
19. What affect does the narrator’s reference to himself in the 2nd-person have on the reader? “You wake up at Air
Harbor International” (25)?

20. When narrator states: “Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear effect. I
prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts on the wings…I prayed for a crash” (26), what does it
reveal about his character and what does it become a metaphor for?

21. How and where is Tyler introduced?

 22. What does the “cigarette burn” or white spot on the film represent? What might the audience’s ignorance of the
changeover in movie projection be a metaphor for? How and why?

23. What does the “splicing” of frames explore and become a metaphor for? What affect do the contradictions and
shock-values of the contradiction, penises and vaginas and popcorn, have on the text?

24. What does the waking up at different airports become a metaphor for?

25. What anxiety is revealed by the narrator’s job? What is the relevance of his introducing it in terms of an actuarial
problem?

26. How does this connect to porn spliced into movies?

27. What theme does the question, “could I wake up a different person” (33) pose?

CHAPTER 4
28. What is Palahniuk doing with language and its meaning on page 35 “no one will ever say parasite. They’ll say,
agent. They don’t say cure. They’ll say, treatment” ? What kind of commentary on our verbiage and terminology
is being made? What commentary is being made on our terminal-ology?

29. What is the greater meaning of “Marla’s the faker. You’re the faker, Everyone…it’s all just a big act” (35)?

30. How does the extended and “objective/cold/calculated” description of Chloe’s death diffuse the emotional impact of
the event? Why?

31. How does this tie in with Marla’s statement “there was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it
with” on page 38?

CHAPTER 5
32. When the narrator describes the explosion in his apt. and its contents, what is the narrator really
attacking/exploding/destroying? What is the affect of his use of the second person “you couldn’t open the windows”
“your living room set” “your set of hand-blown green glass dishes”?

33. What is a “house full of condiments and no real food”/narrator’s refrigerator a metaphor for?

34. What street does Tyler live on? What does that signify?

35. What is the following an allusion to…and who stands in for ‘whom’
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
May I never be complete.
May I never be competent.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete. (46)

CHAPTER 6
36. How is fight club introduced? What does it reveal about societal law, self-improvement, family, being “alive” and
engaged vs. phoning it in …?

37. Who is Tyler fighting?

CHAPTER 7
38. How is the relationship between Marla and Tyler introduced?

39. What import is there in the Reader’s Digest series of articles? and what is revealed about the narrator’s internal
state when he becomes “totally Joe’s Gallbladder” upon learning about Tyler and Marla having sex?

40. What societal commentary and comparison does the parallel between dildos and Barbies create?
 41. During her suicide attempt, what do Marla’s shouts about the ‘girl in 8G’ reveal?

42. What do Marla and Tyler’s actions suggest when they rush out to the cab, what does it become a metaphor for?

CHAPTER 8
43. What meaning is there in the narrator’s suspicion that Marla and Tyler are the same person?

44. What commentary does : “the condom is the glass slipper of our generation” (66) provide?

45. What do XMAS trees typically symbolize? What commentary does this parallel make on the way XMAS is now
(not what it’s meant to be, but what it has become in our society)?

46. What is the symbolic import or metaphor created by Tyler and the narrator’s use of the lye?

47. At this point in the novel, what do you suppose is the purpose of the Fight Club? What themes seem to be being
explored here?

CHAPTER 9
48. How does the narrative connect soap and human sacrifice?

49. What does the narrator do to the Blarney stone?

50. Why are the stories of human sacrifice and pissing on the blarney stone intertwined?

CHAPTER 10
51. Pissing becomes a ‘motif’ when it is carried on into…?

CHAPTER 11
52. What happens to the soap they make? What is the main ingredient in this soap?

53. Why was Marla saving the fat? What social anxiety or cultural moment does this speak to? What does the phrase “it
was Marla’s collagen trust fund” (91) make a pun of or a play of words on?

54. Who else made soap out of humans?

55. BUT, this also becomes humor, when Tyler says “we have a big order to fill. What we’ll do is send Marla’s mom
some chocolates and probably some fruitcakes” (92) … How is this text working to horrify you and make you
laugh? Why?

CHAPTER 12
56. What is the effect or point of having “birth defects in the fetus of any pregnant woman who comes across it” (94)
boiled down to “A times B times C equal[ing] the cost of a recall”? (95) …and no recall being instituted?

57. How does the reader learn the rules of the fight club?

58. Why have rules? What affect is there that there are rules?

59. What is narrator’s conflict at this point?