The truth is that back then, I didn’t make much of Palahniuk’s ideas at all.

That’s what I’d have thought when I first came across Fight Club around the turn of the millennium.

So the tragedy is one of misunderstanding, isn’t it? You’re just wrong to see it as any kind of guide to anything. This is not really a book about “self-actualisation”, unless you want yourself to be physically and mentally screwed up. And he shows regret: “I’ve been behaving miserably,” he says in one scene. He is shown with a rubber band literally and metaphorically tightening around his “gonads, jewels, testes, huevos”. His actions leave the narrator and moral centre of the book feeling awful, desperate, trapped. The things he does are clearly more than transgressive: they are abhorrent. He is never shown to be right rather, he is portrayed as a maniac living in a fever dream. Tyler Durden isn’t a hero and he isn’t building a better world.

If you see Fight Club as a guide to life and justification for your opinions, your reading of the book is partial at best. Perhaps the best reaction is: more fool them. Plenty want to use Fight Club as an inspiration and guide. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’re the middle children of history, man. I’m not going to give those sites the benefit of a link, but if you want to make yourself feel ill, you can Google “radixjournal” and “Generation alt-right” where you’ll find an article by “Hannibal Bateman” quoting (film) Tyler’s idea that: Researching the book online, I found myself falling down a dark wormhole of fascistic websites that quote big chunks of David Fincher’s film adaptation as parts of their credo even though parts are almost verbatim from the book, alt-right types tend to quote the film – because they either don’t agree with the overall message of Palahniuk’s book or they haven’t bothered to read it. If, meanwhile, you followed the Gamergate problems a few years ago, saw those message boards develop into nodes of far-right agitation, or had the misfortune to hear the likes of Milo Yiannopolous, you will find many of Fight Club’s ideas about carving out a niche for men eerily familiar frighteningly so, given the wider context of the book and the violence at its core. We’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. If, like me, you’ve been confused at being called a “ special snowflake” when debating with people about issues like Dumbkirk (read: Brexit), look no further than chapter 17 of Palahniuk’s 1996 novel, when a character reads a note written by the novel’s chief provocateur, Tyler Durden:

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk