Mainly reading this book, I’d like to find out what made it popular enough to become a famous movie. Also to be able to get it done in time to return it. Basically, this book is about Jack and his alter-ego Tyler Durden. Jack’s apartment blows up, Tyler steps in, and they start the titular Fight Club. Of course, you don’t know at the beginning that Tyler isn’t real. Tyler is kind of an awful person. He attends meetings for those dying of terminal illnesses for fun. He also becomes disillusioned with modern society.
Fight Club Blog 3 – Christina Ellis
The hermeneutic code. The book begins with a huge enigma surrounding the location, characters and their actions. The narrator explains that even though they were best friends for a while, Tyler is now holding a gun to his mouth and threatening to kill him. This situation becomes even more perplexing when the narrator (who I’ll call Joe since he remains nameless throughout the book) starts talking about drilling holes to make a silencer and the building blowing up from the bomb he knows how to make. The reader is posed with many questions about the events that led them to be in this situation and what kind of people these men are.
The proairetic code. The reader can determine that the story begins with the end. There is the huge climactic event happening and Joe even counts down throughout the first chapter to build up anticipation. Gun in the mouth and building about to collapse in ten minutes. A window explodes and napalm is easily made. Nine minutes. Murder-suicide. Eight minutes. Smoke out of the windows. Seven minutes. Desks and filing cabinets plummet to the ground. Six minutes. Marla and the love triangle. Who is Marla? What the hell did she do to cause this?
The semic code works from the very beginning to set the tone for these characters and the entire story. There is something seriously wrong with both of them to be trying to kill themselves and others. Napalm, blowing up buildings and murder/suicide are what surround them from the start. The reader can take an inferential walk to guess that this story is not about mentally stable people.
FigHt cLub Pt.4
On the Ball
I found the narrator to be somewhat be obvious or even hinting to the addressee. I was able to see that from the beginning of the story the narrator was interesting in informing the reader of what was going. Although not every narrator is reliable the narrator in fight club is to be trusted in some forms. One of these forms is how the narrator shows the reader who he is through his subtle conversation with the reader. He tell the reader about how feels and his emotions in every climax of the story.
There is a clear message that the narrator is trying to relay to the reader and it isn’t a message that the reader cannot trust.
The tragedies the narrator encounters and walks through only change his surrounding but not how he is thinking. The narrator is walking through life without a purpose until he finds fight club. He dismisses his misfortune and draws all of his focus on fight club but this pulls him into a greater turmoil. The addressee is fortunate to have a relationship with the narrator through which the story can only unfold,
Fight CluB Pt.3
Hollow
Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to point out the themes and codes as early as I have seen them in the text but I believe this book shows them to be evident from the beginning. The narrator tell me everything that is happening in his life converging it with feelings of depression and pressure.
He tries to manipulate the reader to settle with his emotion and not with his strange actions. The narrator goes to live with Tyler without hesitation even though he is a stranger. This is strange for me to see at the beginning of the book, especially after the narrator describes his life style. Yeah maybe the narrator’s life is a bit dull and not creative in any way but to go with a stranger as quickly as he does just doesn’t sit well with me.
A symbolic code begins to settle because of his actions and my reaction to them. If you have no idea what a symbolic code is ill explain. a symbolic code is sort of like the story on top to the story that the submissive reader cannot usually see. The authoritative reader is the one that usually sees this other story. The story on top of the story in this case is brought about by symbols in the text that tell the reader what is really going on. In Fight Club the narrator show the reader of his discomfort with his mundane life through the mentioning of what he has in his possession. The things he owns are not a symbol of his freedom but of his imprisonment. The doorman tell the narrator that all that is left of the apartment he owns is only a concrete shell now. This shows very well what the narrator life became and was at the beginning of the text. The narrator was just an empty, meaningless, hollow body without a soul, with nothing to live for.
Fight Club Blog 2 – Christina Ellis
There is a repetitive form throughout this text. There is a constant with the narrator wanting to live a normal life and Tyler wanting the overthrow everything. There are a few themes that are brought up many times during the text. The narrator grew up without a father, the unfairness of the system (specifically with the narrator’s job and the classes), and the monotony and mundanity of his normal life – he wants to be the revolution, his life is supposed to be more than it is.
Having already seen the movie, I know that Tyler Durden doesn’t exist. I tried to look for signs of that while reading the book, while still reading in the memetic register and becoming a submissive reader. I thought it was very strange that most of the time when he was talking there weren’t quotation marks around what he was saying. When Marla is around seems to be the biggest indicator that something is off. The narrator admits that Marla and Tyler are never in the same room around him but they have sex every night. Then she dances around showing the narrator that she has nothing on underneath – a very odd thing to do to the roommate of the man she sleeps with every night.
Fight ClUb Pt.2
Reoccurring themes and situation rise up numerously in this book. The narrator is constantly in a battle over the control of his actions. The characters in the book are constantly pulling on the narrator and manipulating him by simply there presence. for instance Marla is a catalyst for the narrator when ever he is taking part in the support group. She is the cause of his need to plan when to go to the support group in light of when Marla will not be there. Tyler is the catalyst for the narrators freedom from his job’s reign over his life. Tyler frees the narrator, a freedom that enables then narrator to engage in fighting on weekend.
Tyler is the catalyst for the narrators freedom from his job’s reign over his life
The story has a qualitative progression through which we see the narrator slowly become another character entirely. The main character goes from being a dull blue collar worker to a rebel against the system. This idea is constantly reoccurring in a subtle manner right from the beginning. such as when the narrators apartment blows up and he does not bother to go up to the floor but simply calls Tyler to go live with him. He deviates from a common reaction and is careless of the things he has lost and it is a catalyst for his desire to be free fro
Again and again the narrator looks at the climatic and altering situation as a progression of his fight toward freedom. He feels liberated from a system and routine when the unknown occurs and manipulates his reactions. I believe this is foreshadowing of the chaos that will occur in the book next. The climatic situation will get more epic and extravagant causing the narrator to lose control again of where he want to head in light of freedom. I would even suggest death as his ultimate freedom.
FigHt CluB!
My eyes swing back and forth while letting the words on the pages of “Fight Club” lead me into an unknown discomfort. A discomfort with a narrator that has taken a style of writing that i have no idea how to follow. Everything is at risk in this book with me as a reader specifically the authoritative reader. Being an authoritative reader requires that I know the text in all it forms and right now I don’t know what I’m reading.
I see the narrator as person who is psychotic and his actions are not conventional. I’ve entered a text where I am not submitting because the characters are maniacs and i do not want to submit to this chaos. The narrator is explaining his practice of going to support groups for different death causing diseases and I’m baffled by why he is justifying doing so. If I don’t don’t stop resisting i never know the truth of these practices that the narrator has.
“Instead of Tyler, I felt I could get my hands on everything on everything in the world that didn’t work, My cleaning that came back with the white collars button broken. The bank that says I’m hundreds of dollars overdrawn”
In chapter six of “Fight Club” I’m reading the text where the narrator is explain his fight with Tyler who lets the narrator get the first hit. The narrator describes the feeling of the first hit as being freeing. Everything that has been taken away from such as the support group and his freedom at his job no longer have a hold on him. The narrator feels he is relieved of his need to take back his control at his job and the support group he goes through of which Marla has taken from him. I see this as as a symbol of his first figurative punch to the face of his job and Marla. His first battle won in the war for his mental freedom.
Fight Club Blog 1 – Christina Ellis
I want to be a submissive reader so that I can feel all of the aesthetic emotion the text has to offer, but, at the same time, I want to read for the rhetorical dimension to see when the narrator addresses the reader and what their purpose is for addressing them. I’m hoping I can do this simultaneously without taking the fun out of reading the story for the first time. I want to be aware of the pretense of the narrator. I will attempt to “observe the struggle between what the text projects and the manner in which the addressee takes up the projection” (Weebly, Rhetoric of Narrative). I want to read for enjoyment of the story but also for how the author achieves the thematic effect of controlling values through style and form. I know the premise of the story so I want to see how the narrator chooses to deceive the reader into thinking Tyler exists. I’m going to read the whole story through and then come back to do the value graph and summarize. I want to experience the text and all it has to offer before I dissect it to see how it works from the inside.
The narrator struggles with the boredom of his life. He lives in a building of the same kind of people, buys the same kind of home furnishings and goes to the same job he hates every day. His job deals with recalls for vehicles. The job constantly reminds him of death and the unjustness that exists between the classes. He sees how the rich upper class hide potentially fatal flaws in their products in order to save money. He goes to accident sites where people have died because of these hidden mistakes. The formula used to decide on whether or not a recall is made is the number of vehicles multiplied by the probable rate of failure multiplied by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (30). Whichever costs the company less money is the right choice. This job and growing up without a father are what create his split personality. Tyler Durden is nihilism and male bravado. There is a side to the narrator that desperately wants to break free of monotony and live a life of chaos and disorder. He wants to rebel against not having a father growing up and the unfair ways of the world.
Old Man Blog 4
The narrator is telling a simple fishing tale. He wants you to know about the man and to feel his pain, physically and mentally. He lets us know what the old man looks like and how he feels. He gives us insight into the world the old man lives in and how he fits into it:
“…many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it…”
He sets up the old man’s struggle and brings the reader into his world so that we can relate and continue reading.
The author wants to bring to light the cultural codes that surround this old man and his situation. The story is one big metaphor that can be dissected in many ways. The author is continuing the long progression of stories that deal with man and nature, rich and poor, simple and complex and the powerful and powerless. All of these codes are appropriate given the communist culture in Cuba when Hemingway lived there.
The rhetorical dimension of this text is clear when you take on the role of a resistant reader. The submissive reader will only see the tale of the old man at seas trying to catch a big fish. They will see the struggle this man faces and take it at face value. As Sam observes in his blog, the submissive reader will be “perhaps another old fisherman listening over some beers on “the terrace””. They will not look for any hidden meanings and symbols behind the words.
The resistant reader who joins the authorial audience will find this text to be polyvalent and as multi-faceted as the sea. The man and his fishing tale are necessary tools to portray the underlying theme of this man’s struggle to stay alive and hold on to his youth. He is still making plans to go out again with the boy even as he is lying on the bed unable to move because of his exhaustion and injuries from this trip. The last line in the book is “The old man was dreaming about the lions”. He is dreaming about lions because he is dying. He draws strength from thinking of his youth and the successes he’s had in the past; it’s what keeps him going.
The Super Senior and the Text TOMATS blog 4
In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway addresses two different readers. The first is the resistant reader who falls into the narrative audience of a fishing tale, perhaps another old fisherman listening over some beers on “the terrace,” accepting everything as true in . The resistant reader reads only for mimesis, empathizing with the old man’s decline and struggle to continue being a fisherman.
The second is the submissive reader who understands that the narrator is in fact the old man himself is is . The old man is the only witness to his adventures with the fish, therefore he is the only possible narrator. However, lying is part of the old man’s semic code as hyperbole is part of the fishing tale genre.
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