Money, Fight Club, and the Ex-Pat Community in South Korea
The FIGHT CLUB by CHUCK PALAHNIUK is a GREAT book, one that everyone of the X generation and Y generation should read. But not only do the youth of America need to rock out and check this book out, but EVERYONE/anyone (or even nobody) who can identify with those lost souls who inevitably find pleasure through pain, learning through suffering, and love through loss should read this essential story. And all of the aforementioned sensations are also known as the heightened senses that exceptional individuals experience under dire circumstances, yet find solace somewhere within.
I've been thinking about this book for a few months now. My fascination with Mr. Palahniuk's work arose ever since I had the good fortune of falling upon this prized novel at Kyobo Bookstore (a famous bookstore in Seoul) and, since, I've even pondered over some of the greater concepts within the book that he touches upon like nihilism, and anti-establishment. Not only did these ideas grab my thoughts, but it is also Mr. Palahniuk's ability to place the reader in another's shoes, and help our lost soul selves to feel another form of human connection, that which is formed from across a distance, and from across a seemingly un-tredable terrain -- one that is possible to reach, only after a demonstration of superhuman character and wit. It is through these very real, raw human emotions where different versions of identity -- those that border closely with mental breakdowns and complete chaos -- does the reader begin to feel layers which he or she may or may not have felt before.
How this book also relates to my daily life as an English Teacher in Seoul, for instance, just today I was shocked to see the balance on my credit card account! The amount of "foreign transaction fees" and the extra International Taxes that are SLAMMED on each of my purchases are more than DOUBLE the taxes that I paid for in Michigan -- a state that has a 6% sales tax added onto food and other goods. This all helped me to cheer on the destruction of the credit card companies at the end of story, not to ruin the ending for any readers out there.
At first, as an English teacher in Korea, you come to learn and expect the amount of different "fees" that you find yourself slammed with, and later adapt to, and it all just starts to pile up, especially two months before you're ready to leave the country.
But the thing is, as it goes in the story, the main character FIGHTS against not only other MEN in slimy, dark and especially dingy basements in the most dismal of MASCULINE infested places, but he also fights against his other half, which is represented in many different forms in the story.
His identity, in terms of the halves that he sees in not only in his psychosis, which creates "Tyler", but later in his organization, and within his romantic relationship, as he diverges from his whole self into two different personalities altogether, which then dates one woman.
As the story unfolds, the main character, Tyler, fights and fights and finally overcomes capitalism in modern day America, as he fights off "Tyler" in the end, all the while saving Marla, the woman he is in a romantic relationship with, and, finally, destroys the credit card companies in order to regain a hold of his life, anew.
But in the process, I related to him, a white male Y generation representative, supposedly. Unfortunately, I, too, felt sorrow and pain throughout my process of self-healing, while in Seoul, South Korea. It's a very peculiar thing, indeed, to not only visualize a story as seen on the big screen, being that it is one of my all-time favorite movies, but to feel as if I lived and survived my own FIGHT CLUB, much like the hero of this must read novel.
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