The Narrator and Tyler Durden Are Raging Inside Me

Warning: This blog post may contain spoilers from the previous millennium. Read at your own risk.

This past weekend I finally got around to watching Fight Club. Yes, I know I’m about thirteen years tardy to that party, but I can finally say I’ve seen it. It’s trippy, but it’s fascinating. The chemistry between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt is phenomenal. And any movie that features two singers that I greatly appreciate (Meat Loaf and 30 Seconds to Mars’ Jared Leto) is fine by me!

The purpose of the post isn’t to review or gush over the movie. Roger Ebert I am not. I want to talk about what I find to be the most interesting aspect of the film: the moment that the unnamed narrator (Norton) comes to the realization that Tyler Durden (Pitt) does not exist in reality but instead is nothing more than the manifestation of everything the narrator wishes that he could personally be. As Tyler says, “All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look… I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” While the narrator (at the beginning of the movie at least) is safe and milquetoast, with a lack of confidence and a love for all things IKEA, Tyler Durden is brash and bold, with big ideas and a disdain for the capitalistic system and the burden of media. The narrator comes to realize that all the things Durden did both good and bad were deeds actually done by the narrator himself. He then had to make a choice of which dog inside himself he wanted to feed.

Now, most of us (hopefully) do not suffer from dissociative identity disorder, but we all have a Tyler Durden living inside of us. There is an idealized version of ourselves resting somewhere that (to varying degrees) we wish would manifest itself realistically. Each of our Tylers look different because they are each a reflection of our individually idealized selves.

So what is my Tyler Durden like? Aesthetically, not much different. I dress how I want to dress. I talk how I want to talk. Sure, I’d like a little more muscle tone, but I’m working on that. However, my Tyler is bold and confident. He does not fear rejection and failure in the same way that I do. He recognizes risks and embraces them. He sees everything as opportunity, and he never ceases to seize those opportunities.

Because something is our idealized self, does it mean that it is the best thing for us? Of course not. The narrator has to atone for the missteps of Tyler. Tyler Durden is everything the narrator wishes he could be. As we all know, sometimes the things we want are far from the best things for us. But where the narrator failed, we can succeed. We do not have to make a concrete choice between our real and ideal. Rather, because we are dynamic beings, we can choose the appropriate characteristics of our real and ideal to optimize ourselves. We are the narrators of our lives, and we are Tyler Durden, and really, that’s okay.