Fight Club

The Narrator learns meditation while attending terminal illness support groups. At first, he does not put much stock in the practice, as he finds it easily corrupted by his anxieties about meeting Marla and being exposed as a fraud. Later, when Tyler pours lye on his hand to scar him, the Narrator retreats into a guided meditation that takes him through a trip to Ireland from his youth. While he does not see his old “power animal” anymore, the meditation does help him stave off the pain for longer than he thought. Tyler scolds him for trying to meditate through the chemical burn, and he calls it an avoidance strategy. In the support groups, meditation represented a search within oneself for peace and harmony, but in the physical world of Fight Club and Project Mayhem, it is seen as a form of retreating when one ought to embrace the pain and turmoil.

Tyler’s luxury soap business is predictably lucrative in their consumer-driven culture. He is enthusiastic about his craft, and for the history behind it as well. Tyler views soapmaking as a connection to some of the most ancient brutality and pain that there is in the world. He describes the fat rendered from animal and human sacrifices washing downriver with rain-soaked wood ash (an early form of lye) to make soapy enough conditions for one to bathe or do laundry. Tyler notes that if one were to skim the glycerin off the top of rendered tallow, one could make nitroglycerin and, from there, other explosive substances. He says that with enough soap, one could blow up the world. Ironically, a symbol of domesticity and, in Tyler’s case, luxury beauty can be manipulated into a purely destructive substance.