This is the first time I have read Fight Club since having started writing myself, and I can already see how differently I am interpreting it. I notice much more about the style and the techniques used by Palahniuk than I ever did the first time reading it. I find myself more and more curious about the writing process that went into this book as well, and about the circumstances which inspired it. In the interim between my first reading of Fight Club and this one I have seen Chuck Palahmiuk at a few readings, which also serves to shift some of my focus to the author and the writing process as well as the work. He himself is a very charismatic person, and I can see bits of Tyler in him and his ability to inspire admiration.
This is also an interesting read for me because of the difference in myself between the first reading and now. When I first read the book in 1998, just before the movie came out the next year, I was seventeen. If anyone ever doubts the duality of a reader/author relationship, try going back and reading books that you had first picked up as a teenager…when you were smart enough to understand, but didn’t have the life experience to interpret. When I was a teenager, I was entangled in my loathing for authority and interpreted Fight Club almost entirely as a struggle against the powers-that-be. Now that I am much older, Fight Club’s ideas of materialism, gender, and the search for identity ring truer. In some ways I am better able to understand the narrator, because I am him. When I was seventeen, the culture was still whispering to me that I could be a rock star, a movie star, I could be someone. Now that I am 26 I understand the pain and confusion of the narrator when you begin to realize that you have been lied to all along.
