Will Ernst and Jack Westerfield
Ms. Doyle
AP Psychology
December 4, 2014
Character Analysis We watched the movie Fight Club directed by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. At the beginning of the movie, we meet a man who is plagued with insomnia. His name is never revealed so I will call him the narrator, but he works a job that requires him to travel a lot. He can never sleep (he suffers from insomnia) and copes by buying home décor. The job he works deals with unsafe cars that have a fatal flaw but the company would have to spend more money in order to fix the problem than to just pay the settlements. This wears on the narrator. I think that before proceeding to talk about the prompts you have given us to answer, I think that it is important to explain the two sides of our narrator’s personality, this then plays into some of the ideas that we have learned about in class. Our narrator suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. This brings out a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type feel to this motion picture. There are two sides to the narrator’s personality: the narrator and Tyler Durden. The narrator works a capitalistic job and is more like an everyday American. He works a nice job so he can buy nice things, the typical citizen of a capitalistic society. Tyler Durden, on the other hand, is somewhat “out there” he is not the type of person that would “fit in” in our society. He does not care about his outward appearance, he sells soap, and I think the best example is his so called “house”, which was more like an organized pile of rotten wood. The narrator would fit in, in the society that we live in whereas Tyler would not, because of this the narrator acts more in line with the side of his personality that allows him to fit in. This idea relates to the belongingness motive that we have learned about.
At the beginning of the movie the narrator is a hopeless insomniac who goes to support groups to cry. Because of his inability to sleep, this makes the narrator somewhat numb to the outside world. These support groups allow him to cry and feel the pain of others. It seems as if throughout the entire movie the narrator has some sort of inclination or complex for pain. As the movie progresses the narrator becomes more confident in himself. He was once trapped in a terrible work cycle, but through fighting he finds a new sense of confidence in himself. I’d say that the fight club, socially, is a bad thing, it causes members to be more antisocial but at the same time I think that it gives them confidence to do something that they may have never done prior to fight club, for better or for worse.
The relationship between the narrator and Tyler Durden is very interesting because it displays the sharp contrast