Tyler Durden as the Perfect Man Joseph Carter Sindelar 12th Grade

In Robert Bly’s book about exploring what it means to be male, Iron John, he wrote that modern men are “not interested in harming the earth or starting wars. There’s a gentle attitude toward life in their whole being and style of living. But many of these men are not happy. . . They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving.” To Bly, modern men are forced to become docile creatures and slaves to the corporate lifestyle. Men have no great war to be a part of, and since an early age they have been taught to suppress their inner urges to fight and seek conflict. They have learned that this will make them happy, and that violence is never okay. Alternatively, Chuck Palahniuk’s fictional novel Fight Club and David Fincher’s movie adaptation Fight Club build a universe where men break these rules.

The novel is told from the perspective of the Narrator who has a dissociative disorder. The Narrator’s alter ego, Tyler Durden, is representative of what the perfect male would be in the Fight Club universe. Tyler is cool, confident, and is everything the Narrator thinks he has to be in order to be the perfect man. A man in the Fight Club universe is completely detached from the world around him, defies societal norms, and is...