Fight Club Persuasive Essay

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Another reason this novel should not have a sequel is due to the extreme violence and how it is addressed in the book. Rather than trying to keep violence to a minimum, the book describes violent episodes in graphic detail and uses it as a main plot point. Fights in novels should be used as an expression of the conflict between morals or between good and evil, but violence should not be encouraged as it is here. Fight Club portrays fighting as a way to solve all problems. The narrator says, “You aren’t alive like you’re alive in fight club” and “…when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved”(51). Fighting is portrayed as a positive way to solve problems when it just isn’t. The violence is described in a very graphic way such as when the narrator describes fighting a new member of fight club, “I hit our first-timer and hammered that beautiful mister angel face, first with the bony knuckles of my fist like a pounding molar, and then the knotted tight butt of my fist after my knuckles were raw from his teeth stuck through his lips”(123). People don’t want to read about such graphic things in novels, because they don’t want to have to envision that in their minds. The book uses anger and violence as a driving point in the novel, and the author says he did this on purpose. He said in an interview, “When I wrote Fight Club in my 30s, my winning strategy was to fall back on anger; to always get pissed off. Anger would get me past every humiliation or every time where I felt I was being laughed at and failing. Anger was the little engine that drove me.” Anger drove the narrator, so it also drives the novel.

There should not be a sequel to Fight Club. The ending, while leaving some loose ends open to interpretation by the reader, provides a sense of closure. The fact that there is room to interpret what happens to Tyler Durden provides comfort in that the reader can believe what he or she is most comfortable with. We see that Tyler Durden is not an “everyman” character or one that is easily relatable to therefore to continue with the story line makes no sense. He lives in a world filled with chaos and disorder and his dark, harsh views of society and violent actions are difficult to tolerate, they certainly are not the sorts of things that leave you wanting more. It’s one thing to have “urges” and another thing to carry out these urges into actions that hurt others. At the end of the novel, the narrator does not seem to be in a rush to get Tyler back and this makes for an appropriate way to end the story line – let the reader decide. The sequel takes this decision away from the reader, and brings back a character whose actions are difficult to relate to along with the gratuitous violence that has already been played out.