According to MIT writing Professor Junot Diaz “… if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”
In the novel “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk, the narrator of the story would easily fit into Diaz’s personified definition of monster. The narrator “reflects” the opposite of almost everything that we would think a normal put together person with a stable psyche should “reflect.” This gap or vast distancing from “normal” allows, those that closer relate as an opposite from my previous sentence, to be able to rationalize and justify labeling him a monster; even if he is truly only a broken human being crying out, begging for help. To answer how a reader of this novel should interpret the characters, I believe it is up to each reader to decide upon what degree of leniency to give each character when judging their monstrous characteristics. I also believe this judging will be done by each reader standing in-front of each character and finding out what gets reflected. Every person has had a different path that brought them to the point they are at now and everything that has been learned during that journey is used to help determine the way they perceive, feel, and relate to the new and different things they come across.
ty talley 