Capitalism In Fight Club

Words: 1644
Pages: 7

Our minds are everything to us it allows us to think feel and perceive the world around us yet we still underestimate the power it has to help us or deceive us. Fight Club takes advantage of this idea. Fight Club is about a nameless man who has been living a meaningless, dull life and is suffering from severe insomnia. He has been brainwashed into thinking that buying new furniture for his apartment will make him a more fulfilled human. Our narrator then finds himself going to local support groups from testicular cancer to HIV he notices that his only relief in life is to breakdown and get pity from the other attendants, and once again he can sleep. He then meets Tyler Durden his alternate personality that he has created to break himself …show more content…
The philosophy in fight club is that capitalism has allowed men to purchase identities rather than creating their own. When you do this your just building a fake identity and just as the narrators does yours will come crashing down too. In the beginning of the book/movie the narrator’s apartment is shown as an example of this. The narrator talks about how he has a need to purchase furniture and how he lets his material possessions define him saying “Id flip through catalogs and wonder, what kind of dining set defines me as a person?” (Fight Club). He goes on saying “I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting respectable. I was close to being complete” (Fight Club). He thinks his possessions are the answer to filling the void he has in his life. He predicts commercialism will only get worse saying “When deep space exploration ramps up it will be the corporations that name everything, the IBM stellar sphere, the Microsoft galaxy, planet Starbucks” (Fight Club). He has lost hope in society on thinking for themselves. Tyler is the driving force behind the anti commercialism in the book. It is the main idea of his philosophy, that we need to break free from the grip of commercialism and only then can we grow as individuals. This is shown in a quote by Tyler in the film, he