The Deceptive World of Ideologies

Abstract

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club along with David Fincher’s adaptation of it, is a critical response to late 20th and early 21st century American society. The reader gains a critical insight into contemporary capitalist and conformist culture through the narrator’s existential journey of renewal. In the course of this journey, he gets acquainted with Tyler Durden, who finally turns out to be his idealized self. Tyler’s nihilistic and existentialist ideologies are transmitted through fight club and mostly through Project Mayhem since he believes that there are no worthy goals in life anymore because they live in a hyper real world controlled by advertisements and material goods literally dehumanizing the masses of people. His ideologies prove themselves to be false arguments, thus depicting him as a hypocritical leader.