The Degeneration of the American Dream in The Great Gatsby and Fight Club.

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Shreya Sachan

Assistant Professor Karuna Rajeev

Anglo-American English

30 March 2014

The Degeneration of The American Dream in The Great Gatsby and Fight Club

The Statue of Liberty is one of the first sights that greet immigrants on entering the

New York Harbour. The statue represents the female Roman Goddess of Freedom and it

bears a tabula ansata upon which is inscribed the date of The American Declaration of

Independence, July 4, 1776. The very first and basic ideology of the founding fathers of

America which gave way to the birth of the American Dream was best pronounced in this

document drafted by Thomas Jefferson: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that

among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (“American Declaration of

Independence”).

Freedom, equality and opportunity for all, are the characteristics which summarize

what America and the American Dream stand for. The founding fathers had an idealistic

vision in their mind that an individual can succeed in life regardless of his race, religion and

family background if he is willing to work hard and follow a set of certain principles. But

with time, a number of people have lost their faith in the American Dream and this number is

increasing day by day.

While reading the novels, The Great Gatsby and Fight Club, I came across

Palahniuk’s afterword and how he considers his novel, Fight Club, an updated version of The

Great Gatsby. In my paper I will be examining how the latter is an updated version and how

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both the novels, even though they were written seventy years apart from each other, are

similar. Also, I will be examining the degeneration of the American Dream in the Jazz Age

and how it is perceived in the present age, in the former part of my paper. In the latter half I

will talk about how male female relationships work in both the novels – the objectification of

women and how they come to represent the American Dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a novel based on the concept of the

American Dream in general and the 1920s version of it in particular. The American Dream,

during the Jazz Age, led to the development of commodity culture in America and its

devastating impact on the individuals has continued to this date and a version of it can be

seen in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club as well:

Each book offers a distinct snapshot of the American Society of its time, and

because both Fitzgerald and Palahniuk are fascinated by the way social and

economic conditions affect their characters’ lives, when read together the

books present a study of the ascendancy of commodity culture and its cultural,

social and personal ramifications. (Gizzo 70)

When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby a process of consumption was replacing the

process of production. According to Kentz, since Fitzgerald rocketed to fame and wealth with

his first book and was a keen observer of the social and economic conditions of the period.

His personal situation made him particularly alert of how commodities are a signifier of

status and class. If The Great Gatsby was about the suspicion regarding “the culture of the

commodity [spinning] out of control” (Changizi 2), Fight Club confirms these suspicions

telling us how the commodities control us now, when the narrator observes: “the things you

used to own; now they own you.” If The Great Gatsby was about a vacuum in the soul of

society after WW1, or the downside of the American dream and the struggle of the classes,

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then Fight Club is also about the rejection of that dream. Both novels revolve around the

Critique of Western Capitalism. The American Dream is definitely forgotten and twisted.

Hard work, good ethics and equality for all, which are the basic factors constituting the

American Dream, are degenerated and this is what leads the protagonist to his tragedy, not

the dream itself. In contrast to the original definition, the ideals of freedom, equal opportunity

and happiness are replaced by infatuation with material possessions, immorality and bigotry.

Despite the vast differences in the settings of the novels, the narrative structures,

narrative style and character dynamics are similar. In the afterword of the 2005 paperback

edition Chuck Palahniuk indicates that this novel is “. . . just The Great Gatsby updated a

little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction – where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There

are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death” (216).

Palahniuk refers to Fight Club as an apostolic narrative. Fitzgerald and Palahniuk

both use a similar narrative structure to frame the stories. In both the novels the narrators

recount their experiences of their past lives. They recall the history of their relationship with

the heroes - how Nick Carraway met Jay Gatsby and how the narrator of Fight Club met

Tyler Durden, how they became a part of their heroes’ programs and ambitions and

ultimately witnessed their deaths. Nick and the narrator of Fight Club are portrayed as

followers to the heroes’ and they first create suspense in their tales and then slowly uncover

their true identities in the course of the novel.

Jay Gatsby and Tyler Durden are extremely different characters if seen at a glance.

Gatsby is a wealthy man with a large mansion on West Egg and though his means of income

are dubious and he has mysterious antecedents, he is a likeable character. Tyler on the other

hand is a charismatic loner who works odd jobs as a movie projectionist and banquet waiter.

While Gatsby is trying to enter the American upper class, Tyler, lives in a decrepit house in a

chemical waste part of town, shuns capitalism and envisions himself to be “the guerrilla

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terrorists of the service industry” (81). Both the heroes’ capture the narrators’ loyalty and

attention and this results in the recapitulation of the stories.

Both Nick and the narrator of Fight Club are alienated from their busy, urban

societies, but even more alarmingly, both seem “alienated from themselves and their own

desires to an almost pathological degree presented in terms of compromised masculinity”

(Giroux). In this lonely and aimless state they meet their heroes who are seen as “godlike” by

their “apostles”. Both narrators first observe their hero near an ocean, caught in a gesture that

seems to capture ambition and idealism. The narrator of Fight Club first sees Tyler Durden

sitting in the “shadow of a giant hand” he has created by arranging logs on a beach, Nick first

sees Gatsby on his lawn overlooking Long Island and suddenly stretching his arm towards the

dark water. These first meetings become very important as they show the “heroes” to be self

sufficient and contained in an idea of perfection. For Gatsby, this longing comes in the form

of the green light, Daisy, as he stands in front of his big house which is a fruit of his efforts.

For Tyler, the hand which he has created such that it will cast a shadow of a perfectly

proportioned hand for only a minute, is his form of perfection: “A moment is the most you

can ever expect from perfection” (52).

This capacity for self making and self definition make the heroes of the novels appear

Godlike to the narrators. Both of them are split personalities in the sense that Jay Gatsby

makes a new persona for himself from Jimmy Gatz and Tyler is a figment of the narrator of

Fight Club’s imagination which is a result of his insomnia and disorientation leading to

Multiple Personality Disorder. He also serves as his alter-ego since Tyler is everything that

the narrator is not. Both the heroes are idealists and want to convert their idealism into action

at any cost. The narrator of Fight Club along with Tyler decides to blow up the credit card-

companies in order to implement his ideas while Gatsby employs all kinds of manoeuvres to

get what he wants, i.e., Daisy. Acts of self-invention form the centre of both these novels and

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connect the heroes to the American Dream – the Franklinian promise described earlier in the

paper.

The narrators of both the novels are astonishingly similar even though they exist

almost seventy years apart of each other. Both of them are in their early thirties and are

engaged in employments that are impersonal and dehumanizing to an extent. Their lives are

devoid of meaningful relationships and intimacy and they feel alienated from the world

around them and cling to outward forms for a validation of their sense of self. The narrator of

The Great Gatsby lived in the twenties and that of Fight Club lived in the nineties but an

aversion from the mass, urban environment of the 20th

century and an emphasis on

impersonal, commercial exchanges is seen in both cases. In fact, the narrator of Fight Club

can be seen as an intensification of Nick Carraway owing to his inability to connect

personally with others and also the fact that both the characters experience a split in identities

due to their encounter with commodity culture – Nick resorts to the bond business instead of

writing and the narrator of Fight Club builds a wholly different persona for himself. This

“fractured sense of identity gives way to many similar psychological symptoms which

include lost time, forgetfulness, alienation and most importantly a split sense of self” (Huskey

2). This is a reminder of the fact that they are unable to formulate an “integrated, productive

and coherent sense of self amid the changes they face in the modern ways of the world”

(Huskey 2).

In the beginning of The Great Gatsby it’s briefly mentioned that Nick Carraway is a

recently returned soldier from the Great War. He is uncertain and undirected and decides to

study the bond business just because everyone else was studying it. This lack of independent

self purpose makes him “anchor his identity in his family” and he begins the narrative with

“words of wisdom from his father (which he has obviously misunderstood)” (Gizzo 72).

Nick’s identity is still deeply rooted in the Midwest and this Midwest background gives him a

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basis for comparison for judging the glitz and materialism that surrounds him. He comes to

the East because he is feeling restless and finds himself “living an anonymous life structured

by the impersonal interactions and mechanical rhythms of the modern world, which only

exacerbates his restlessness” (Gizzo 73).

His employment in the bond business and his daily routine is also devoid of all

personal interactions and intimacy; it all the more heightens his acute sense of loneliness and

alienation. The problem is reinforced by his nature of work which involves dealing in abstract

commodities on a disembodied market. Even though he tells us that he is on first name terms

with his colleagues, he never gives us any of these names while he serves us a long list of

names of people who were attending Gatsby’s party. The issue of names reflect the tension

around intimacy and identity in the novel. Throughout the book Nick has difficulty

connecting with people, especially women, highlighting his emasculation. He is involved

with three women in the course of the novel and he remains detached and disconnected from

them and abruptly ends the relationship for inexplicable reasons almost every time.

Like Nick, the narrator of Fight Club who is a thirty-year old business professional,

remains aloof from the world and alienated from the people around him. His alienation is

portrayed directly as a symptom of consumer-driven, late capitalist culture that is so

impersonal that the narrator is not even given a proper name as a form of identification. He

lives in a sophisticated, global economy marked by convenience and nearly unimaginable

plenty. While Nick suffered from restlessness, he suffers from persistent insomnia and this

becomes a signifier of how the system is giving place to a “dehumanising prison” (Bloom

75). Even the nature of the narrator’s work is as troublingly abstract as Nick’s bond trading

and even more sinister.

In his capacity as a recall campaign coordinator for a major automotive firm, the

narrator of Fight Club spends his days running equations in which he weighs human lives

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against the cost of out-of-court settlements, deciding to “recall” only if it is financially

profitable. He has become a slave to the system and a victim of the process of

dehumanisation. His life is largely devoid of intimate relationships, so much so that he calls

the people next to him on flights “single-serving friends” (31) and compares them to the “tiny

soaps, tiny shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash” (21) he encounters in hotels

during his travels. He travels endlessly, revealing how work life has come to dominate

personal life.

The Great Gatsby does, however, register suspicion around the new, transformative

and magical properties of objects in a commodity culture. As Gatsby elaborates on the (false)

stories of his extravagant youth, Nick explains that “With an effort I managed to restrain my

incredulous laughter: “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image

except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore” (70). As if sensing Nick’s

disbelief, Gatsby produces two forms of hard evidence to support or even perhaps materialize

his words – a medal he was supposedly awarded by a Montenegro during the war and a

photograph of Gatsby at Oxford. After these items are produced, Nick abruptly suspends his

disbelief remarking “Then it was all true” (71). Fitzgerald thus captures the transition to the

logic of a commodity-based culture. A similar moment occurs when Owl Eyes assesses

Gatsby’s library: “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. . . What thoroughness! What

realism!” (50). Despite his tendency to live in dreams, Gatsby demonstrates that he

understands the power of objects.

The obsession with commodity, similarly, in Fight Club is expressed through the

narrator’s description of his condominium. The Narrator lives in an unnamed city and as he

cannot fasten his identity to his family, he looks to consumer brands to fill the void and

complete his sense of self. We are shown how obsessed he is with his expensive

condominium with one feet thick walls, making him even more isolated, and the IKEA

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furniture, “a house full of condiments and no real food” (41). We realise that the whole

lifestyle itself is emasculating and the IKEA catalogues give the sense that his desires have

been shaped for him, but all of it is a social construct which very cleverly manages to frame

an illusion of personal choice. His life and identity are reduced to the objects he buys. He

tells us how the commodities become a part of his identity:

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my

life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you’re satisfied that no matter

what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right

set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. (44)

Brand names have replaced ancestral names as markers of identity. The Yin Yang

table that was destroyed could be symbolic of the balance of life that was destroyed in the

form of the destruction of his condo. The narrator goes on to tell us, “I wasn’t the only slave

to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography,

now they sit with IKEA furniture catalogue.” The obsession with commodity has even

replaced sex!

In Fight Club the language of marketing, advertising and commodities dominate the

text but the enchantment with the entire process of longing and desiring had disappeared. The

process of disenchantment begins when the narrator realises that all the promises of

guaranteed satisfaction are illusory and his relationship to commodities has become a

substitute for knowing himself and forging relationships with people (Gizzo 77). With the

ascent of commodity culture, the narrator appears to have caught on to the reality, of what

baits advertising and marketing use, to enchant the customers. He suspects even himself to be

a part of the “hamster-wheel of perpetual consumption,” says Zygmunt Bauman.

Moreover, he connects the focus on constant consumerism in contemporary culture to

an underdeveloped sense of self. Not surprisingly, this suspicion is also accompanied by a

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longing for the personal, the real and the intimate. The support groups and eventually the

bloody fights of fight club suggest the escalating desire for intimacy. At the support groups,

the intimacy is emotional as personal stories about illnesses are shared and even the physical

intimacy is given space in form of long hugs. But there also the Narrator uses a fake name

and even when he encounters Marla Singer, a woman who, like him, attends support groups

under false pretences in an effort to feel alive, he is unable to make a connection with another

healthy person and feels threatened and annoyed instead. After the narrator finds fight club,

intimacy becomes associated with violence instead of pathology. It becomes clear that

intimacy and the deeply personal have no natural place in contemporary culture. At the fight

clubs, the emotions aren’t even given any form of articulation and physical intimacy is

favoured as men wrestle each other in various states of undress (Turley 36).

If Gatsby suggests that mystification of objects is achieved by distancing it from

oneself, Fight Club responds to a world filled with mystified objects with a primal intimacy

in the way Fight Club, where they indulge in one-on-one fights, governed by a set of rules

devised by Tyler. The counterpart of these situations in case of Gatsby are the lavish parties

that he throws at his mansion which are attended by people he doesn’t even know. The want

of intimacy is reflected in Gatsby’s parties, the sound of loneliness echoes in his huge

mansion which is home to Gatsby and a few other servants. Despite the fact that they share a

surrealistic style, the language of Fight Club is preoccupied not with metaphors and symbols

as in The Great Gatsby but with descriptions of bodily function, organic matter, and “Do-It-

Yourself” guides that tell you how to make bombs and soaps. Similarly, it is the hero of

Gatsby who attempts to cleanse himself symbolically by anglicizing his ethnically tinged

name, James Gatz, the hero of Fight Club proudly pronounces his guttural name, Tyler

Durden. He also rebuffs any compulsion to “cleanse” himself for the upper classes, choosing

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instead to make expensive soap out of their liposuctioned fat, which he sells back to them so

they can cleanse themselves.

In short, Fight Club responds to the “highly polished, upward mobility of Gatsby with

a celebration of muck and a determined, purposeful disenfranchisement and embrace of

otherness” (Gizzo 12). While Gatsby was seen throwing lavish parties which Nick attended to

fulfil his lack of intimate relationships, the narrator makes such connections by attending

various support groups, the implication being that illness and intimacy occupy similar

positions in the society.

Commodities are so ubiquitous that Gatsby’s extraordinary gesture of consciously

using them to help define and bolster his identity has become the norm just like the narrator

in Fight Club presents a world in which young professionals of all kinds secure their sense of

self and their social identity through condos in certain parts of town, certain types of sofas

and particular cars. At the same time, the narrator of Fight Club strongly suspects that

something is awry. Although lulled into complacency by his comfortable life and his

fondness for his objects, he begins to sense something vaguely sinister in contemporary

culture. In this way, the world of Fight Club becomes a logical extension of the culture of

commodification at the center of The Great Gatsby.

Chuck Palahniuk argues in his 2005 afterword argues that both books are about “two

men and a woman” (215) and therefore calls the books “romances.” Both the texts can be

read as “quest romances” keeping in mind Daisy’s representation as a “grail” and the quest

for self-knowledge of the narrator of Fight Club. As a modern day romance, then, The Great

Gatsby is steeped in the language of marketing as a way of emphasizing the potentially

transformative properties of commodities. Gatsby relies on commodities to support his self-

made identity. He believes that all these commodities along with the crowning piece, that is

Daisy, will open the gates of upper American class for him.

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Although it is a conventional thought that the novels are a form of quest romance, it

doesn’t give an accurate description of male/female relationships in either novel. It can be

observed that the romance in Gatsby is not about the “love” affair between Gatsby and Daisy.

Although much debate surrounds Daisy’s character, for Gatsby, she appears to be less a

person than an idealized object that will complete and validate the identity that he has carved

out for himself. In Fight Club, Marla is used for sex by Tyler, and while the narrator develops

a camaraderie with her based on their relationships to Tyler, it is hardly a love affair or a

“classic, ancient romance” (216). According to Leslie Fiedler:

“The typical male protagonist of our [American] fiction has been a man on the

run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat –

anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man

and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility” (26).

This assessment aptly describes the male protagonists of both Fight Club and The

Great Gatsby, who demonstrate an allergy to woman and at the same time see the female

body as representative of the American dream – conquest and consumption. Fight Club

makes use of the same symbolism found in The Great Gatsby where the female body is

described in terms of land, or property. The Narrator says, “We have sort of a triangle thing

going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me. This isn’t about love as in

caring. This is about property as in ownership. (89)” The acquisition of property, of course,

is precisely why Gatsby finds Daisy Buchanan so attractive. For Gatsby the fact “that many

men had already loved Daisy… increased her value in his eyes (149)”. Tellingly, when Daisy

catches a cold, making “her voice huskier and more charming than ever,” Gatsby becomes

not only “overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and

preserves” but also of Daisy herself, “gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot

struggles of the poor” (150). The presence of Daisy, then, is no presence at all. In fact, she is

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disembodied – a mere voice, but one “full of money” signifying that “High in a white palace”

resides “the king’s daughter, the golden girl . . . (120)”.

Fitzgerald invites readers to consider Gatsby in this light with his references to

Gatsby’s house as “feudal” with its “high Gothic” library (49); he even explicitly presents

Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy as “following the grail (156)”. In both novels, objects often seem

to have special properties that make them magical, promising, and potentially dangerous.

Nick’s relationship with Jordan Baker further reveals his sexual ambiguity and a certain

misogyny. Nick labels Jordan as “incurably dishonest” and attributes her flawed character to

her “inability to endure being at disadvantage.” Nick says, “Dishonesty in a woman is a thing

you never blame deeply” (58). Through these statements, Nick simultaneously provides a

reasonable explanation for their eventual break-up and validates his masculine identity. Tom

echoes a similar disdain for Jordan’s independence, saying, “She’s a nice girl . . . They [her

family] oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way” (18). Both men react to the

independence and assertiveness of Jordan with a contempt that is indicative of anxiety.

All this also summarizes the historical trajectory of masculine subjectivity in modern

America. Nick points out that at the turn of the century “to be a man was to create oneself in

the capitalist marketplace – to achieve economic autonomy, self-sufficiency, and ownership

of productive property (296)”. The turn of the century, however, saw an explosion of

“monopoly capitalism that reduced men to dependents in a large bureaucratic structure. The

Women’s Suffrage movement, culminating in 1920 with the Nineteenth constitutional

amendment, was further evidence that the ground of traditional gender identities in America

had forever shifted. Fitzgerald registers the historical male anxiety over perceived

emasculation by using the automobile as “a symbol of masculinity” and “having the women

(Jordan and Daisy) who drive cars do so badly,” thus wreaking havoc, even killing people.

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Nick’s anxiety, however, is not merely that masculine identity is jeopardized by the

growing social equality of women; his anxiety also stems from the attraction he feels towards

Jordan even though he views her body in traditionally masculine terms: he describes her body

as “hard” (58). In contrast to his depiction of Jordan as untruthful, Nick boldly claims, “I am

one of the few honest people that I have ever known” and thereby convinces himself that he

succeeds where Jordan fails; that is, that men succeed where women fail (58). Of course, in a

span of two pages Nick has unflinchingly claimed both that his attraction to Jordan is not

actually love, but more of a “tender curiosity” (57). That he settles on being “half in love”

with Jordan is not very surprising, he wanted the girl, but in the end had to sacrifice his

desire, as their moral incompatibility proved too much (177).

Brian Patrick Turley talks about how the only guarantor for Gatsby for a successful

journey from the metaphorical frontier to civilization was his ambition fuelled by an

“extraordinary gift for hope” (2). It is, of course, his chance meeting with Dan Cody that first

opens the door of opportunity for a young Gatsby. Cody, the self-made millionaire whose

wealth came from the western metal rushes, drops the anchor of his yacht over an obscure flat

of Lake Superior, where a seventeen year old Gatsby was living at subsistence level as a

clam-digger and a fisherman. Nick tells us about his early retirement at the age of fifty, a

once “physically robust” man now “verged on soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an

infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money (98)”. Nick observes a

portrait of Cody in Gatsby’s bedroom, describing him as “a gray, florid man with a hard,

empty face – the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to

the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon (126).” While

Gatsby learned of the dangers of overindulgence in liquor from observing Cody, he did not

learn of the dangers of women. Nick implies, however, that he should have learned this

lesson by reporting that Cody “inhospitably died” when a love interest, Ella Kaye, came

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aboard the yacht (100). For Nick, the threat of castration at the hands of a woman is matched

only by the threat a woman poses to a man’s very life.

Gatsby then finally finds some level of wealth. He owns a colossal Mansion at which

he continually throws lavish parties. He owns a new sports car, a hydro boat, and a plethora

of shirts – “shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and

faint orange with monograms of Indian blue” – that he eagerly and pathetically shows off to

Daisy. It was an effort towards demonstrating his new found socio-economic status – one he

hoped would finally prove him worthy of having Daisy for his own (92). Judith Fetterly notes

that the female archetype serves as a metaphor for America in popular imagination, including

The Great Gatsby:

In the archetypal American experience of romantic nostalgia, in which the

sense of wonder is intimately and instantly coupled with the sense of loss,

women are the symbolic counters. It is hardly irrelevant that the

Carraway/Fitzgerald vision of a lost America is so clearly linked to Gatsby’s

vision of Daisy, for in the male mind, which is at once Gatsby, Carraway, and

Fitzgerald, the impulse to wonder is instinctively associated with the image of

woman, and the ensuing gambits of the romantic imagination are played out in

female metaphors. In this fable of the New World in which Gatsby is the

incarnation of the American dreamer and his history is the history of the

“American Dream” it is Daisy herself who is America, the “fresh green breast

of the new world. (73)

On the other hand the vision of America displayed by Fight Club is of a land that has

lost its soul. Like Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, it is “contiguous to absolutely nothing” (24).

Unlike the Valley of Ashes, however, it is a land full of franchise businesses (Starbucks,

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McDonalds); a place where the aspirations of West Eggers have been resurrected, and time

has once again been borrowed. Hence Tyler Durden’s interpretation of the masses:

You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their

lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they

don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can

buy what they don’t really need. (149)

His condemnation of popular culture is equally pointed: “We are the middle children

of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars

and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,’ Tyler said. ‘So don’t fuck

with us.’” (166). Tyler Durden is angry. The crisis of masculinity is also the crisis of

American identity – a promise failed. In the apocalyptic vision of Tyler Durden, there is,

however, nothing worth saving: “Recycling and speed limits are bullshit . . . They’re like

someone who quits smoking on his deathbed” (125). Thus Tyler is intent upon “destroying

every scrap of history” (12). For Tyler, one “shouldn’t just abandon money and property and

knowledge” but should “run from self-improvement” in the direction of self-destruction. (70)

Here we see the connection between late capitalism and masculinity, in the way that

masculine ideals are equated with chalking out an identity for yourself, and to fight against

capitalism to rid yourself of the false promises of the Dream.

Omar Lizardo, in fact, interprets the role of fighting in the narrative “as the last

recourse for the establishment of a sacred (sadistic and homoerotic) masculine bond, but also

as a class-based reaction against the commodification of sociability… in the post-industrial

society” when human contact is no longer a “non-commodified act of interpersonal

exchange.” Lizardo is correct when he points out that on the narrative stage fighting is a

form of “human interaction that has not yet been ‘colonized’ by the logic of profit and

commodification of the system” (235). Indeed Tyler indicates this when he says:

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Fight Club is not football on television. You aren’t watching a bunch of men

you don’t know halfway around the world beating on each other live by

satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten

minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you’ve been to Fight

Club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you

could be having great sex. (50)

Turley also contends, “Tyler in himself is a myth, a fantastical representation of

‘hyper-masculinity’ born of the Narrator’s invulnerability in a rather terrifying consumerist

culture” (502). We might see Tyler as born of the Narrator’s desire for intimacy, this creation

amounts to a mere inversion of the terms of the initial problem – the feeling of emasculation

is replaced by the confidence of masculinity. In their analysis of Fincher’s cinematic

adaptation of Fight Club, Bainbridge and Yates speak to the narrative’s – both novel and film

– “potential as a site for resistance to ideology”:

It is as though the history of Western hegemony, with its idealization of

phallic power, is to be understood as the source of the symptom and that the

experiences of men trapped within its workings are increasingly verging on

the pathological as a result. However, the film also articulates the tensions

between psychic fantasies of phallic power grounded in the symbolic domain

of masculinity, and it thereby confronts the actualities of men’s rising

anxieties and fears of inadequacy. This combined with the film’s revelation, at

the end, of the fact that Tyler and Jack are in fact the same person, alerts the

spectator to the schizoid status of contemporary masculinity. . . (307).

CONCLUSION

In the end, we realise that, the real reason that Gatsby is killed is because he had violated the

social boundaries of Tom’s world where individuals are recognised by their ancestral

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identities. He does not deny him the right to be successful but denies him the right to be a part

of his particular pocket of American Society. Tom Buchanan and Gatsby represent

antagonistic but historically related aspects of America. Marius Bewley goes on to say that

they are “related as the body and the soul when a mortal barrier has risen up between them”

(243). Tom Buchanan is virtually Gatsby’s murderer in the end, but the crime he commits by

proxy is only a symbol of his deeper spiritual crime against Gatsby’s inner vision. Gatsby’s

guilt, insofar as it exists, is radical failure – a failure of the critical faculty that seems to be an

inherent part of the American Dream – to understand that Daisy is as fully immersed in the

destructive element of the American World as Tom himself. After daisy, while driving

Gatsby’s white automobile, has killed Mrs. Wilson and, implicitly at least, left Gatsby to

shoulder the blame, Nick gives us a crucial insight into the spiritual affinity of the Buchanan

couple, drawing together in their callous selfishness in a moment of guilt and crisis:

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a

plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was

talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had

fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and

nodded in agreement. They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched

the chicken or the ale – and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an

unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would

have said that they were conspiring together. (131)

The reason they seek out each other is because they recognize the corrupt spiritual

element that inhabits them both. When, at the end, not even Gatsby can hide his recognition

of the futility of his dream any longer, the discovery is made, according to Bewley, “in

universalizing terms that dissolve Daisy into the larger world she has stood for in Gatsby’s

imagination”:

Sachan 18

“He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and

shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight

was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real,

where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about. . .”

(127)

“A new world, material without being real.” Paradoxically it was Gatsby’s dream that

conferred reality upon the world. The reality was in his faith in the goodness of creation and

in the possibilities of life. That these possibilities were intrinsically related to such romantic

components limited and distorted his dream, and finally left it helpless in the face of the

Buchanans, but it did not corrupt it. When the dream melted, “it knocked the prop of reality

from under the universe”, Gatsby’s death is only a symbolic formality, for “the world into

which his mere body had been born rejected the gift he had been created to embody – the

traditional dream from which alone it could awaken to life”, says Bewley.

The emphasis in Fight Club on breaking away from commodities and retreating to

reality; aligns Tyler Durden with Tom Buchanan who destroys Gatsby, who is in more than

one ways a representation of commodity culture. But on the one hand, while Tom is trying to

hold on to his roots and is on the side of ancestral heritage as the defining norm for social

stature; Tyler and Project Mayhem (the evolution of Fight Club) want to annihilate history by

destroying the museum. Their goal according to Palahniuk is to “blast the world free of

history” (124) in order to begin again and Gatsby wants to rewrite his history and through

social mobility, he wants to escape the rigid order of Tom’s world and overcome the

limitations of his birth. The emphasis on destruction is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of

Fight Club. When Tyler Durden says that “Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer . . .

maybe self-destruction is the answer” (49) he undermines the whole Franklinian idea of the

American Dream.

Sachan 19

The foundations of the American Dream are laid in The Great Gatsby and the desire

to transform the world during this time leads to the origin of an artificial world. The men in

Fight Club who have inherited this world are rushing to destroy this artificial world so that

the earth and society can begin to recover. But both generations have in common the

dissatisfaction with the present and desiring things to be different from what they are at the

time.

Gatsby realizes that the dream he has been pursing is not that of love but of money

hidden behind a human face. Afterwards, When Gatsby dies; any chance of the old American

Dream of surviving in the dehumanized modern world is destroyed with him. All of the hopes

and dreams that strengthened and uplifted Gatsby are shattered as he lies in his pool, dazed

and confused about the world he is living in and about to leave. After shooting Gatsby,

George Wilson, the symbol of the common man who is trying to achieve his own success in

the modern dream, commits suicide. The deaths of both the rich and poor man trying to

achieve their goals symbolize the death of the old American Dream. The dream is now

completely lost and can never be restored. Through the tragic story of Jay Gatsby and his

failed attempt to reach his dream, F. Scott Fitzgerald also describes the tragic death of

American values. The characters in The Great Gatsby are mere examples of Fitzgerald's

message - the old American dream and all of its pure ideals have been replaced with money,

greed, and materialism. Nick Carraway conveys this message as an outsider, an honest man

from the mid-west who witnessed the whole affair as an observer. The Great Gatsby is not

about the life and death of James Gatz, but about what James Gatz stood for. It is about the

life and death of the old American Dream (Gizzo 79).

Reading The Great Gatsby and Fight Club side by side puts them into focus as novels

about the development of commodity culture in America, its devastating impact on

individuals, and the issue of masculinity in a way that reading them separately does not. It is

Sachan 20

worth being noted that both these books more or less bookend the twentieth century. We

realise that Fitzgerald’s observations about the dynamics of commodity culture make The

Great Gatsby in many ways “the culmination of the consumer mentality in [its] era”, says

Mary McAleer Balkun and by the end of the twentieth century, when Chuck Palahniuk wrote

Fight Club, America had moved beyond the fledgling stages of commodity culture and into

the challenges of late capitalism.

Fight Club thus not only “updates” The Great Gatsby but reflects upon the American

Dream and commodity culture across the twentieth century. The temptations discussed argue

that commodity culture in some way destroyed the nobility and purity of the American

Dream. Fight Club seems to encourage the claim that in the world in which the dream has

gone horribly wrong, that it is now a nightmare, but closer inspection suggests that maybe the

problem is with the dream itself because it seems to be inherently destructive.

It is almost like Tyler Durden is paraphrasing Fitzgerald when he says “We’re the

middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great

Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives” (84). As a

prophet of the American Dream, Gatsby fails – miserably - a victim of his own warped

idealism and false set of values. In this essay I have tried to demonstrate how Fight Club

develops the uneasy undercurrent about the potentially dangerous aspects of commodity

culture in The Great Gatsby and how Fight Club works to locate the danger in the

transformative power of The American Dream itself. Although it is not explicit in Gatsby,

this is what leads Fitzgerald to his notoriously ambivalent attitude towards the American

Dream despite Nick’s desire to believe in it and in Gatsby, but by the time we reach the

context of Fight Club, “The American Dream is not to be a reality, in that it no longer exists,

except in the minds of men like Gatsby” (Pearson), whom it destroys in their espousal and

relentless pursuit of it, the American dream is, in reality, a nightmare.

Sachan 21

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