미국의 자기 파괴적 남성다움의 가능성과 한계: 척 팔라닉의 『 파이트 클럽 』을 중심으로

Abstract

This study explores not only the subjective violence created by an American middle-class white man, but also the objective violence that causes the subjective violence in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Although he is a safe man in society, the unnamed narrator feels a sense of emptiness inside, so much so that he suffers from melancholia and insomnia. The main reason for his depression is that he does not have a father who can teach him how to compete with other people and how to maintain morality within society in order to become a typical model of American manhood. This is why he creates Tyler Durden, his fictional alter ego, and organizes Fight Club in which men fight each other in an effort to establish a feeling of power within the world. Tyler exists as a father figure for the unnamed narrator, and as an ideal subject who can criticize the problem of the late capitalized society and build a new, self-destructive manhood that helps men break their limitations. Tyler uses fighting, subjective violence, to encourage the men to explore their own possibilities and to bond with each other, and then points out the true nature of the objective violence within the capitalist society. Tyler, however, threatens to take over the unnamed narrator’s body and acts like a tyrant. Moreover he ignores the sacrifices made by the other members in order to maintain Project Mayhem, the organization that succeeds Fight Club. Thus, the unnamed narrator begins to doubt Project Mayhem’s validity and realizes that it excludes the “other,” such as Marla Singer who symbolizes the socially weak. In other words, he finally understands that Tyler does not, in fact, establish a balance of power needed to resist the systematic violence that interferes with the healthy and productive lives of the subject within the capitalist society. Therefore, he cannot help but confine himself to a psychiatric hospital in order to be free from Tyler.