Fight Club Essays Examples

Hero’s Journey

The first stage of hero’s journey is the world of common day where our hero is still a part of the known world. Here we can look at the history of our main character, the narrator who we know where he works for an unnamed car company where he has to assess car accidents and decide what actions his company needs to take. Here we see that he is supposedly living the ideal life materialistically, he has a job that pays well for him to able to afford an expensive condominium with lavish furnishings. However, we also know that he is really depressed and unhappy due to the purpose of his job which he considers dehumanizing as what is promised is not delivered in this consumer driven society and becomes an insomniac. The second stage the ‘call to adventure’ for the main character begins when he is first introduced to Tyler Durden who becomes a major influence on the narrator. The third step and the last step of the known world during the departure is when the character refuses his ‘call to adventure’ by going back to his normal life and deciding to continue living it the way he has always.
The fourth step which is meeting with the mentor which we can see is the ‘threshold of adventure’ and the move towards the unknown world takes place when our narrators burns his place doing, without knowing it at the time and calls his mentor, Tyler Durden which becomes the beginning of their very own, fight club. The first step into the unknown world takes place with the narrator giving everything up and moving in with his partner into an almost broken down home and commits to adventure by facing the unknown.
As he moves on through his journey into the unknown world, he comes across new rules of living, makes enemies and more friends. Here we can distort Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid as we know that the main character had his biological and safety needs fulfilled whereas he was lacking in belongingness and love, esteem and self-actualization needs. He had no relationships, he was mistreated at work which takes away the esteem needs and ultimately there is no personal growth so self-actualization needs are also absent. So to attain those needs are character seeks to give up his safety needs and move into the unknown world to find fulfilment. He begins moving towards fulfilment in his hero’s journey as the beginning of project mayhem begins to take place as he approaches the inmost cave which is his dangerous place.
‘The supreme ordeal’ takes place when the main character realizes that his friend is not really his friend but he is Tyler Durden and the creator of project mayhem. When he goes around trying to find Tyler and realizes that he actually is Tyler Durden, we see that he is faced with his greatest fear, having a split personality and planning to destroy a city’s economic standing single handedly.
As he goes through fulfillment and move towards reward, we see that the narrator shoots himself in order to get rid of his alter ego and comes out on top cured of his delusion and with a sense of achievement that we know according to the Maslow’s hierarchy that he was lacking in his esteem needs, he got them fulfilled. We also see that by the end when he takes ‘the road back’ to the known world he comes out transformed with a clearer vision and ‘returns with elixir’ with Marla Singer.

Works Cited

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999. DVD.