preview

Consumerism In Tyler Durden's Fight Club

Decent Essays

One of the main themes in Fight Club is the growing problem of consumerism, and of course how to solve it. It was this problem that propelled Tyler Durden to gradually lay the foundations of Project Mayhem, which would allegedly lead to the demise of consumerism in society. Although most participants of the various Fight Clubs seemed to believe that they were solving the problem with Project Mayhem, this was evidently not the case. Project Mayhem eventually became what it was created to destroy. The project aimed to collapse civilisation and set man free from the consumerist world; a world which had fallen into a cycle of obliviousness to supposed oppression from the elite upper class. Tyler Durden was not blind to this oppression. It was his mission disrupt order in any, and all ways possible. Whether it be splicing pornography into movies or ruining someone's soup at a restaurant, he refused to conform to the order of society. This is where Project Mayhem was rooted, and where it would inevitably grow to become its antithesis. …show more content…

The act is one of many in a series of vandalism across the unnamed city, and it was seemingly insignificant. What is more significant in this circumstance, is rather the order behind the chaos. The narrator asks, "Was it the Mischief Committee or the Arson Committee?" (Page 119) Whenever a committee is mentioned, one would assume that a sense of order or organisation would be involved, and order is the proposed enemy of Project Mayhem, hence the "Mayhem" in its name. To reinforce the idea of order within the project, the narrator suggests that it may have been a "homework assignment," (Page 119). This is a clear reference to typical school work, in which there is a hierarchical relationship between the student and the

Get Access