“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect. Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete. Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.†(46) It was this meeting that began the narrator’s new life, a shift from a member of the herd to a free individual. In Chuck Palahniuk’s most famous work, Fight Club – now a major motion picture – we follow the most important change the narrator has ever made in his life, through the help of an anti-establishment free spirit, Tyler Durden.

The narrator remains importantly nameless throughout the entire novel – although the movie calls him “Jack†- in reflection of his original life as an analogue to anyone’s life. He works a regular nine to five job, lives in a condo, buys nice stuff from Swedish furniture magazines, living that life that most everyone lives. And he was happy, happy with his “Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers†(43) and the like. He was happy until one day he returned from a business trip only to find his condo had blown up, sending that Haparanda sofa group crashing to the street below. It was at this moment that he called Tyler Durden, drank with Tyler Durden, fought with Tyler Durden, moved in with Tyler Durden and started Fight Club with Tyler Durden.

Before starting Fight Club the narrator combated insomnia by running out to different therapy groups, therapy groups for testicular cancer, tuberculous, brain parasites, degenerative bone diseases, and organic brain dysfunctions – he saw real pain in order to recognize that the pain of his boring life and his insomnia really meant nothing. It took the realization that life was so precarious to find greater joy in his own life. But then Marla Singer came around, another faker, and the insomnia returned, until Fight Club anyway. Fight Club gave the narrator a new kind of release, where he and others – members of the herd by day – could gather in basements of bars and other places to do something society looked own upon, fight just to fight. In the vein of Dostoevsky, Tyler and the narrator take a look at rationality – having a stable job, compiling possessions and being happy like everyone else – and just blow it off. The narrator sums it up best when he says “[t]his is freedom. Losing all hope was freedomâ€Â, (22) and in this world of hopelessness led by Tyler Durden, the narrator found his way out of the herd.

Perhaps Tyler Durden represents the closest any person can get to Nietzsche’s ubermench, a person in full control of their life, ideas and with a will to power that cannot be torn down by the herd. Again, the narrator progresses out of the herd and – after time in Fight Club – realizes that “after a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question you, even that doesn’t piss you off.â€Â(49) Fight Club provides for the narrator what Marla stole from him, a break from the degraded freedom consumer society imposes on people. He had lost his condo, lost his possessions, but now he was freer then he had ever been and nothing could break his will. Tyler recognizes the change and offers up the most stimulating advice of the novel, “’Its only after you’ve lost everything…that you’re free to do anything.’†(70)

Palahniuk also explores other themes in the random jobs of Tyler Durden. In all his work he takes whatever is the norm and spits in its face. He splices together family movies, and randomly adds pornographic frames that pop up for less then a second but leave people wondering. Moreover, he fights his own form of class war as an upper-class waiter, serving the richest of the rich and all the while piling whatever bodily fluids he can into their dishes. The most important job of all, however, is Tyler’s own business – Paper Street Soap Company – where he and the narrator steal the fat from liposuction clinics and turn it into soap only to resell it right back to the same rich people who paid to have their fat removed in the first place. All of these acts have one thing in common – they are all subversive to the dominant paradigm – they all go against what people generally consider rational. Moreover, they function in much the same way as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who – in Nietzsche’s own words – must be the first person to recognize the most calamitous error, morality, that the historical Zarathustra first created. Durden is working to oppose the morality that the narrator – the herd instinct in us all – has created.

Moreover, Tyler Durden’s personal goal of presenting people with “near-life†experiences is his way of promoting the ubermench in all people. In the confrontation with Raymond K. Hessel, a convenience store worker who once aimed to become a veterinarian, the narrator – doing Tyler’s bidding and with “Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth†(155) – changes Raymond’s life forever. At gun point he says he will be watching him and he must be on his way to becoming a veterinarian or he will be killed – since his life is such a waste anyway. The narrator completes this “near-life†experience by explaining that Raymond K. Hessel’s “dinner is going to taste better than any meal you’ve ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life.†(155) This works, again, as an expose of the necessary precariousness of life – that for every bad thing that occurs to a person, it makes those good things all the better.

The final important theme illustrated in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel comes in the end, as the narrator reflects on his actions from “heaven†- a prison cell. He began to realize that it wasn’t just Tyler Durden’s words coming out of his mouth, but rather that he is Tyler Durden – the Tyler Durden that made him more free and the Tyler Durden, that in the end, aimed to blow up buildings. Tyler was the free man the narrator couldn’t be for himself, his only hope was to create someone new, but the freedom went too far. Its difficult to be free, its full of angst, and once the narrator realizes that everyone Tyler did, he did, he comes to realize that he doesn’t need Tyler any longer – he is free now – and he does away with Tyler, only to wind up in a prison cell, with a whole in his face. He receives letters from Marla – now his lover at large – saying they will bring him back soon. He also receives his lunch tray, every now and then, from a man with a black eye – and realizes his legacy lives on. But in the end, he was wrong – or at least that is what the God behind the long walnut desk keeps telling him. He says, he should have realized that each person is a “sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialnessâ€Â. (207) But the narrator – or Tyler perhaps – leaves us with the best possible advice: “God’s got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.†(207)