Masculinity In Tyler Durden's Film

1. As the novel begins we find Tyler Durden holding a gun inside the Narrator's mouth. Tyler tells the Narrator that the first step toward eternal life is death. The Narrator mentions that he and Tyler used to be friends and that people were always asking him about Tyler. Tyler assures the Narrator that they won't really die, but that they will become legends. 2. The Narrator reveals that the building they are standing on, the Parker-Morris building, will be demolished in ten minutes. A bomb has been set to knock the building down. In the building, in the one hundred ninety-one floors, the Space Monkeys in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are throwing file cabinets and furniture out the windows. 3. Now, the Narrator says, there …show more content…
Some scholars have also taken particular interest in the passage in which Tyler Durden splices pornography into family films. Krister Friday, for example, asserts that Tyler's subliminal insertion of an erection into family films is itself an assertion of masculine prowess in an otherwise emasculated world or medium. This use of the image of an erection as a means of protest can be seen as a strike against the concept of a weakening masculine identity in contemporary society. That this image is meant to shock or disturb also suggests that Tyler Durden's view is that masculinity itself has become something to be marginalized and forgotten, replaced with a dynamic that some scholars see more akin to the feminine. This view also suggests that Tyler's philosophy has misogynistic tendencies, blaming a "generation of women" for raising their sons to be less than men. 27. Chapter 5 begins with the Narrator talking to a security task force officer at the airport. The officer tells the Narrator that the suitcase he checked at Dulles Airport had to be removed from his flight because it was vibrating. The Narrator says he had everything in that suitcase: His shirts, pants, shoes and ties. Usually, the security task force officer says, the vibration is an electric razor. Sometimes, however, it is a vibrator. His suitcase was inspected by the bomb squad on an abandoned runway. The Narrator's electric razor was the …show more content…
Tyler and the Narrator also discuss their fathers. This is a theme that the novel returns to several times. Both men feel abandoned and neglected by their fathers, individuals who they feel had little interest in them as children. Tyler states openly that the thing he is really fighting is his father. Because of the lack of father figures in their lives, Tyler states that he and the Narrator are members of a generation raised by women. As such, they have little sense of their identities as men. Their existence has always been in relation to women, and not themselves. Their fathers were their only models for adult males. Because their fathers failed them, Tyler advocates the destruction of their memory. Only by shedding that model can they improve upon and be better than their fathers. 61. Chapter 7 allows us to see the home life that the Narrator and Tyler now share. The Narrator's worlds collide when he discovers that Marla and Tyler have met and are regular sex partners. The Narrator's jealousy towards Marla suggests a homoerotic fixation on Tyler. It is debatable whether the Narrator seeks to replace Marla and take her place. Palahniuk never states openly that the Narrator seeks a physical relationship with Tyler. It is possible that these overtones are there to suggest a greater complexity to male relationships than most heterosexual men would normally