Fight Club 2 by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
To be honest, the plot here left me very, very confused. I’m not famous for interpreting things very well, and this is especially true when, in comics, the narrator is lying to me and those lies are accomplished by telling me one thing and showing me another. I have a hard time picking up on what’s real and what isn’t, what the intent of the author is, what they want me to see and what they want me to see but only with difficulty.
But it’s been a loooooooong time since I tried to get all high school English, 5 paragraph essay on some shit, so what I’m gonna do is take a crack at it. And along the way, I’ll give all the kids some tips on stretching a lil essay into a 5-page grade grubber.
Spoilers Ahoy.
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Peter Derk
Eng 001
Rollins
Block 6
07/07/2016 [note: the more stuff you put here, and if you double-space it, the more space you take up. Don’t be afraid to include things like the time of day, current mood, student number, and anything that could be used to identify you and the paper]
Fight Club 2: The Revival Is The Burial [subtitles are crucial, and sub-subtitles are what get kids into fucking Yale and shit]
Since the dawn of time [ALWAYS start with this. Teachers hate it so much], man has loved to hate a sequel. We love to see the return of a favorite hero, such as Rocky, and we love that we get another look into the hero’s world, but we hate it that a creator is reasserting control over something he created. We hate to be reminded that, without this creator, we wouldn’t have the original work to which we can compare this new work.
In this essay, I will prove that Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club 2 in order to bury his Fight Club work in not just a symbolic way, but in a very real way. He did this by choosing to revive his most popular work, by using obvious sexual imagery in the book [ALWAYS put some kind of sexual thing in a paper. This will either make the teacher think you’re way beyond your years or make them afraid to comment on these sections (sextions) because they don’t want to comment on a minor writing about sex stuff, so you get a free pass], and by including himself and his fans in the text.
Chuck Palahniuk could have chosen to write a sequel for any number of works, including Survivor (Paperback: 289 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (April 5, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 039333807X
ISBN-13: 978-0393338072
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces)
[just put all shit shit in there as citation. Can you really go wrong by OVER citing something? Maybe, but whatever, screw them if they don’t want too much information. Maybe they’ll ask for shorter papers next time]
Choke (Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor (June 11, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385720920
ISBN-13: 978-0385720922
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 7.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces)
or Rant, which was rumored to be the first part of a series anyway.
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition (May 6, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307275833
ISBN-13: 978-0307275837
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
However, he chose to revisit Fight Club, his most popular and well known work.
It’s no secret that many an author has been haunted by having produced a mega hit early in his/her/their [use a lot of pronouns, triples the amount of space] career only to have that mega hit become an inescapable highlight. Indeed, rather than having his/her/their book compared to other books on the market, his/her/their book will always, always be compared to his/her/their mega hit. When the author does not reproduce the magic, brilliance, or “the exact same thing but different,” the author’s fans will never be satisfied.
This is why Mr. Palahniuk has re-visited his work in Fight Club. Revisiting and tarnishing it would be the only way that he could live up to his agreed-upon “best” work. He can’t write something that good again because NOBODY can. It’s one of the essential novels of our time, a rare crossover that appeals to college literature professors and brohams alike, an almost impossible feat for a book about men growing up without fathers. Even if he wrote a superior novel, it’s essentially impossible that this novel would be canonized the way Fight Club has been. The only way to write something and have it be perceived as being as good as Fight Club in our time is to make Fight Club seem less good.
Secondly [always start with something like “Secondly” so the teacher knows which of your points you’re on. Trust me, they’re always drunk when they’re grading. They need a road sign here and there, and they’ll appreciate the favor, tip one back in your honor], the psychosexual, genderfucking, phallocentric, ergoblastocystic [a good ratio of real words to made up is 3 to 1] imagery pervades the entire book. Take, for example, the way in which pills are laid out on the page so that they seem to be real, not part of the comic panels. The way in which the borders of the pills penetrate [I don’t care what you read, SOMETHING penetrates SOMETHING, and you can pretty easily throw this in, even if you have to go so far as talking about fonts] the borders of the panels is obvious innuendo, symbolizing copulation [use this word instead of “boning down”]. In addition, the symbol burned into the main character’s palm is clearly an anus [anything in a book is an anus or vagina if you can make an argument in favor of it, which means that everything in a book is an anus or a vagina], while the scar on the other side of his hand represents the vagina. These two scars both represent passage into the world of Project Mayhem, and while it seemed that entering Project Mayhem, like entering the world, required a vagina, it now seems that there is a symbolic “backdoor” as well, represented by the anus. [when it comes to the sex part, just pick a thing, say it looks like a dick or a vageen, and just go fucking nuts. Stare away from your keyboard and directly into the sun and type without even knowing what your fingers are up to until you hit the end of the page. If you’re really stuck, then go for the butthole as a sexual orifice. That’s when you get into territory that’s SUPER uncomfortable]
Thirdly, by including himself in the book and directly saying that he’s a little upset about the way in which his work was interpreted, Palahniuk is attempting to alienate a segment of his fan base that he never wanted.
Quote:
“[he] deceived his community into loving him. That way he didn’t have to reciprocate their love. In fact, he despised them for loving him because only idiots would love something so reprehensible…”
[if you pick a quote, try and take a couple lines around it too. That really rounds things out, and it makes it seem like your teacher is the lazy one for not wanting the context, but really you just wanted to use up dem lines]
Pictured along with this quote is a page of fans with quotes from Palahniuk’s books tattooed on their bodies, fans who don’t even know Fight Club was originally a book.
In addition, there’s a comedic portion where characters attend several different clubs that have cute plays on the Fight Club name, such as Pint Club, and always start with the rules of Fight Club.
Palahniuk is showing that his work has overshadowed him, and become not only a part of popular culture, but a very mainstream part of that culture. His deeply personal novel has become everyone’s property. Like he does in Fight Club 2 with one of the first book’s principal characters, he has to revive Fight Club’s braindead corpse time and again at the behest of fans.
However [you can use this word an unlimited number of times in an essay], by taking the actions of Fight Club 2, Palahniuk demonstrates to the world, and to himself, that he does still control these characters. If he wants to revive them and have them join a fucking carnival, he can. [you can use one swear word, usually, as long as it comes late in the essay and as long as you use it correctly]
In conclusion [ALWAYS end with this], Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fight Club 2 because it was the only way to deal with the original Fight Club.
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[note: I really don’t know if I believe any of that horseshit!]