The Ending of Fight Club

In the end of Fight Club a series of explosives go off, destructing the city below.  I think the destruction symbolizes the death of Tyler Durden. The buildings that crumble to the ground represent the narrator finally “hitting rock bottom”.  At the end of the film, where the narrator stands with Marla watching the buildings crumble, I think represents the narrator as being “cured”.  After the gunshot, the narrator has become a different person. Tyler is no longer the narrator’s alter ego and he stops avoiding his feelings for Marla.  

Final Blog

I really enjoyed this class. It was never boring and always fun.  I feel like I learned a lot of valuable information through out the course. The work was challenging at times, but never a huge stress. I actually looked forward every week to attend the class. It’s always nice to have a great and understanding teacher. If I had to pick one of my favorite topics we learned about in class, I would pick Fight Club. I really enjoy reading books about insanity, drug use, and violence, so I was excited to begin reading it in class. I had never seen the movie before so reading it was completely new.  Reading Fight Club was easy and even relaxing.  Fight Club is something that both men and women can relate to and enjoy. I enjoyed the book from start to finish.  I like how the author used repetition and I easily connected with the narrator.  After reading the book, it was nice to watch the movie and compare the two. I even enjoyed the book so much, that I let two of my friends borrow mine to read it.

Marla Singer

Marla Singer is introduce early on in the story. Marla meets the narrator in a support group.  Just like the narrator, she finds joy and comfort in the suffering of others. They begin going to the same support groups and begin to invade each other's space, so they decide to split up the different groups between the two of them. In the film there is a scene where Marla and the narrator exchange numbers. Even though that scene is not described in the novel, readers are aware that they exchanged numbers.  Marla and Tyler begin to form a relationship.  The narrator is attracted to Marla because she has reached rock bottom.  She has been disconnected with society for so long she doesn't care about anything, even her own life. Her character in the novel plays a much bigger role than in the film.  Marla is in a love triangle war between the narrator and Tyler.  The narrator is attached to Marla because she represents destruction and desire.  In the novel Marla is more self-destructive and in the film she is less self-destructive and is shown more of a romantic desire to the narrator.  In the novel, the connection and desire the narrator has for Marla is developed more slowly and in the film their relationship develops a lot quicker.

Fight Club's Afterword.

In copies of Fight Club that were published after 2005, Chuck Palahniuk included a short afterword describing how the book and film impacted his life.  Palahniuk reveals that his short story of Fight Club turned into a novel, and later became a film. Tyler Durden’s character became a new face of rebellion advertisement.  Real fight clubs were discovered in universities and church basements.  Palahniuk received photographs from strangers who were bruised and battered, showing evidence of their own real life fight clubs.  Before writing Fight Club, Palahniuk noticed that bookstores were filled with a number of books aspiring women together in society. The books were about a social model for women to be together and share their stories and their lives. There were barely any books that were about men in society, or men sharing their stories or their lives. He decided he would create a book containing rules and discipline and nothing overly sentimental.  He also wanted his story to have a “hero” type character.  Fight Club was Palahniuk’s first published novel.  It won the 1997 Pacific Northwest Bookseller Awards, and the 1997 Oregon Book Award for best novel.

WHY FIGHT CLUB BECOMES PROJECT MAYHEM

Fight Club is a film based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.  The narrator and Tyler Durnden get into a fight outside of a bar. The fight attracts a group of local men.  As more and more men start engaging in the fight, a new type of support group is formed "fight club". The group decides to meet in bar basements. As fight club starts to become more popular among men, more and more members get involved. Unknown to the narrator at first, the club begins to spread to other cities all across the country.  After realizing the wide spread of fight club, Tyler begins to use it as an opportunity to spread anti-capitalist ideas through out America.  Tyler gathers the most devoted fight club members, who he refers to as space monkeys and under Tyler’s leadership, fight club evolves into an anti-corporation called “Project Mayhem”.  Project Mayhem becomes an organization and an army whose purpose is to bring down modern civilization. Its members participate in destructive vandalizing acts and complex attacks in cities all over America. 

Comparing Night and Fog to Maus

Night and Fog is a short film documentary that was filmed ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary describes the life of many prisoners who were held in the camps and features many of the buildings in Auschwitz.  Night and Fog also shows the remains of Auschwitz and describes the life of many prisoners.  Maus is a novel about one person's experience as a Jew during the Holocaust. Maus is a graphic novel about Art Spiegelman. It describes his troubled relationship with his father, and of the absence of his mother. Night and Fog and Maus both explain racial differences between Germans and Jews. Although Night and Fog is a documentary about the over all experience every one suffered through in Auschwitz, Maus is based on the experience of only one person, they both explain the suffering of innocent people during the Holocaust and Nazi brutality.

The Dismantling of Arbeit Macht Frei

Arbeit Macht Frei hung from the entrance gate of Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp and extermination center. During the Holocaust, it was surrounded by high electric barbed wire fences, which were guarded by SS soldiers armed with machine guns and rifles. It is now a museum devoted to the memory of those who were murdered and held prisoner during World War II and the Holocaust. December 18, 2009 the Arbeit macht frei sign over the gate of Auschwitz was stolen.  After a three-day hunt and the arrest of five suspects, the sign was found cut into three pieces.  The sign represents a major historical importance to the Jewish people and is considered a tombstone for more than a million Jews.  After the theft, authorities replaced the stolen sign with a replica.  The original sign was found cut into three pieces. The Aftonbladet newspaper reported that the sign had been stolen by Polish thieves, who were working on behalf of a Swedish extremist group.  The group was hoping to sell the pieces of the sign and use the proceeds to finance a series of terror attacks to influence voters in the upcoming Swedish parliamentary elections.  March 18, 2010, Polish court sentenced three men to prison for stealing the sign.  They pleaded guilty. Museum authorities announced that the sign will not be returning to its old location, but will be shown in an enclosed room of the museum.