Chuck Palahniuk's planned 'Fight Club' sequel

The narrator of Fight Club was a man about my age, stuck in a soulless job, with only his material possessions to console him. He does what so many angsty Gen Xers fantasized about: shucks off his corporate drone identity and becomes someone else. His alter ego, Tyler Durden, is an exciting, transgressive, violent destroyer of the status quo. He bursts forth when the narrator’s insomnia gets so bad that he’s unable to keep his id in check. Unlike most people, he gives his id a name and lets it get jobs, make friends, have a girlfriend, and yes, start a fight club and a domestic terrorist organization.

At end of the novel, the narrator’s in the hospital, having shot himself in the face in order to kill Tyler. Lying in bed, drugged into submission, everyone around him eagerly anticipates the moment when Tyler will return.

An insomniac alter ego

As a lifelong insomniac, I identified with the narrator. He says, “Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience.” I agreed with this sentiment wholeheartedly when I first read the book. But until I had a child, I had no idea what insomnia really was.

“The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would’ve thought I was dead.” The narrator says this of himself, just before Tyler breaks through the fourth wall of his psyche. I saw that face in the mirror for 18 months, as my child struggled to learn how to sleep. He had night terrors and woke every couple of hours, every night, until he was almost a year and a half old. This was way beyond your garden-variety sleep deprivation. Everything was a copy of a copy of a copy.

And when nothing is real, when you’re out of your body and out of your mind, the part of you that wants to drop a match to the whole thing seems like the sane part.

I joke that my son’s infancy was like a stint in Guantanamo — it broke me. What came out was my own, personal Tyler Durden. The mommy version of Tyler is pretty scary. I’m only five feet tall, so I didn’t go to a bar and start a fight with a stranger. If I had been a man, though, maybe. It was that bad. And the worst part is, I never fully recovered. Periodically, I have bouts of intractable insomnia that make me want to start my own fight club and Project Mayhem.

Fortunately, there are drugs for this. Thank you, Big Pharma.

What happens next

In the sequel to Fight Club, the narrator’s married to his whacked-out paramour, Marla, and has a nine-year-old son. It’s Marla who chooses to unleash Tyler again by tampering with the narrator’s medication regimen. She’s bored with her staid husband and wants the raging, ferocious, hyper-masculine version of him back. For that, she’s willing to blow up their lives again.

This also rings true — you need your inner narrator to steer the ship, but God, wouldn’t your world be more interesting if Tyler could come out to play sometimes? He’d ruin everything, but you’d feel really alive while it burned down.

Hardcore fans often feel deep, perhaps misplaced, ownership over their favorite works. I have no place to tell Palahniuk that he shouldn’t dip into this well again. But when a book feels like it is, in some weird way, about you, it’s natural to fear that a sequel would violate that truth.

I was intrigued to see how Palahniuk would handle the narrator/Tyler as husband and father. I might love it. It might speak to the current me the way it spoke to the me of 1996. And then I read this quote: "Tyler is something that maybe has been around for centuries and is not just this aberration that's popped into [the narrator's] mind.”

What?

Fight Club allegorized Generation X’s bone-deep dissatisfaction with ourselves. We never thought we’d buy into the Ikea lifestyle, but we have, hook, line, and sinker. It was cathartic to watch someone like you rebel against that lifestyle and to see exactly what the cost would be to completely reject it. You suppress that id because otherwise, you break everything. Women have their own iteration of Tyler: the angry bitch, the manifestation of unacceptable, aggressive womanhood. We’re supposed to nest, but the nest can easily become a cage. Having a child only worsens this crisis because there is so much more to lose by letting Tyler out.

A supernatural cop-out

There’s definitely a story to tell here, but in my opinion, explaining Tyler as a supernatural being totally undermines it. He goes from being Jack’s raging id to being his Dark Passenger, á la Dexter Morgan. This denies the essential truth about Tyler, which is that he is you. He’s more you than you. That’s what makes him so terrifying and so deeply appealing.

I can imagine a sequel to Fight Club that examines 40-something ennui in a truthful way. I can also see it as pandering to fans who can’t just let a story end by an author who wants to revisit his most glorious work and make some money. Tyler Durden was an amazing creation because he was the devil on our shoulder, the part of us who would never settle for our parents’ life. To make him a real devil, not a personal demon, would be to corrupt the story into a hipster version of The Exorcist. Or worse yet, Exorcist II.

So yeah, the ending of Fight Club was ambiguous and unfinished. That was O.K. May it never be complete. May it never be perfect. That sort of thinking is exactly what Tyler was supposed to save us from.

I can feel myself getting angry about all this. Time to take my pill and go to sleep.