Postmodernism in Fight Club Chris Kostantewicz College

Fight Club is an example of postmodernism that radically breaks conventions and questions the meta-narrative that society by large plays into. In the modern world, there’s this ideology that we’re all expected to conform to: get an expensive college education, a job that makes us as much money as possible, an onslaught of material possessions you don’t need, have a white-picket-fence existence in the suburbs, reproduce, then inevitably await our demise. As the film progresses, so does the narrator’s rejection of this common ideology that most of society has chosen to identify with; instead of conforming further, with the help of his Freudian ‘ID’ alter ego in the form of Tyler Durden, he rejects conventional reality constantly and purposefully. Starting from a beginning that indulged in this meta-narrative, to intentionally rejecting it through the form of idealized anarchy and chaos, one extreme to the next. Inevitably highlighting what’s truly important in a world where our lives are fragile and short.

Through the narrator, we explore this meta-narrative in depth because he’s entirely engulfed in it. He works a ‘job he hates’ to buy ‘shit he doesn’t need’ which is entirely apparent in his apathy for living and this notion...