"Breaking the Rules" - Irony in Chuck Palahniuk's Novel Fight Club

Abstract

In my thesis, I shall discuss Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club as a text which reveals the relation between irony and rule-breaking. By close-reading the text, I will argue that rule-breaking cannot only be relieved of the possible accusations concerning its violent manifestations in the text, but it is also an action which is crucial for the protagonist in the course of developing a connection with reality while trying to fashion something that one can call “self.” In my argument, I will problematize the assumption that the “self” has properties of its own, on a non-relational (non-linguistic) basis.