Fight Club

Fight Club is a very interesting novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The two main characters, Tyler Durden and the narrator, experience the freedom of life through creating a club: Fight Club. After drinking at a bar every week, they would fight each other to blow off some stress from the week. As the story goes on, Tyler and the narrator enlarge their club and have some very intense experiences together.
We see the narrator as an average and normal office worker who hates his job. For some strange reason, he cannot sleep; he has insomnia. After a few weeks, he even begs his doctor for some pills so he can get some rest. Unfortunately, the doctor believes that the narrator needs natural sleep. When the narrator goes to a testicular cancer group meeting that the doctor recommended to watch, he observes all the pain and suffering of all these people. They are suffering just as he has been. In some way, they are both dying. During the one on one’s, the narrator meets Bob, and they both cry into each other’s arms. “Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.” For the narrator, this moment was an enormous release, because from that moment on, he was able to sleep. Is that not strange? The narrator goes to doctors and other people for help with his insomnia, which cannot be helped, but when he meets a stranger for the first time, he cries and is able to sleep at night. I just find this very unusual. The only explanation I could find was that the narrator was able to finally express his emotions, because those who were at all those meetings would not judge him. The narrator could emotionally express his feelings through crying, and that was his sleeping pill.
There are also some other questions that boggled my mind. Why does the narrator relate his “fake” tumor with Marla? Could this be because he cannot get rid of her or is it because he must endure being with her? This message seems very ambiguous. Furthermore, is there some larger connection between Tyler and the narrator? Everything Tyler does or is, the narrator praises him for that. Even with simple things like knowing that you can create bombs with a few household items, the narrator seems so amazed. Is Tyler in some way his ultimate role model? Another thing that bothered me is why is Tyler never around when Marla is? Are they trying to avoid each other? Another strange thing is that Tyler made the narrator promise to never talk about Tyler to Marla Singer, even though Tyler and Marla were having sex almost everyday. Is it not obvious that after weeks of sex, Marla would want to talk about Tyler? Some of these events do not connect and confuse me. It all seems like a mystery. I thought for a moment, that Marla and Tyler were somehow imaginary friends of his, which would make sense because the narrator goes to all those ‘sick’ meetings. But that probably cannot be right, because other people have seen Tyler and Marla, especially during the fight club.