Values
"I feel that Fight Club really, in a way... probed into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of advertising."
— Edward Norton[24]
Fight Club is a black comedy that applies heavy satire.[15] The director chose to temper the film with humor to avoid a sinister nature, keeping it as "funny and seditious".[16] Norton described the film to be a "dark, comic, sort of surrealist look" at young people's failures to interact with the value system of which they are expected to be a part.[25] Fight Club parallels Rebel Without a Cause by probing into the frustrations of the people that live in the system.[24] The people had been reduced to "a generation of spectators", having undergone societal emasculation.[26] The culture of advertising had defined society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material objects where the pursuit was supposed to be for spiritual happiness.[27]

The violence of the fight clubs serve not to promote or glorify the notion, but as a metaphor for feeling.[28] The fights are physical representations of resisting the impulse to be cocooned in society.[26] Norton explained that the fighting between the men stripped away the "fear of pain" and "the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth", leaving them to have really experienced something valuable.[24] When the fights transform into revolutionary violence, this dialectic by Tyler Durden only serves as one-half of the film's dialectic, with the narrator pulling back from Durden.[17] Fight Club purposely shapes an ambiguous message that is left for the film audiences to interpret.[29] Described Fincher: "I love this idea that you can have fascism without offering any direction or solution. Isn't the point of fascism to say, 'This is the way we should be going'? But this movie couldn't be further from offering any kind of solution."[16]

Characters
In Fight Club, the nameless narrator is an everyman who lacks a world of possibilities and initially cannot find a way to change his life. The narrator finds himself unable to match society's requirements for happiness and embarks on a path to enlightenment, which involves metaphorically killing his parents, his God, and his teacher. At the beginning of the film, the narrator has killed off his parents but still finds himself trapped in his false world. The narrator meets Tyler Durden, with whom he kills off his God by going against the norms of society. Ultimately, the narrator has to face killing his teacher, Tyler Durden, to complete the process of maturity.[11]

The narrator (Norton) confronts Marla Singer (Bonham Carter) for similarly faking symptoms to attend support groupsThe narrator also seeks a form of intimacy, but he avoids this at first with Marla Singer, seeing too much of himself in her.[15] Though Marla presents a seductive and negativist prospect for the narrator, he instead embraces the newness that Tyler Durden has to offer him. The narrator finds himself comfortable having the personal connection to Tyler Durden, but he becomes jealous when Marla becomes sexually involved with Tyler. When the narrator argues with Tyler about their friendship, Tyler explains that the relationship between the two men is secondary to the active pursuit of the philosophy they had been exploring.[17] Tyler also suggests doing something about Marla, implying that she is a risk to be removed. When Tyler says this, the narrator realizes that his desires should have been focused on Marla and begins to part from Tyler's path.[15]

The unreliable narrator is not immediately aware that Tyler Durden is also him.[11] The narrator also unreliably advocates the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful. Instead, the narrator's body worsens throughout his fights, while Tyler Durden's self-image instead improves due to the narrator's idealistic perception of him. The transformations were reflected in production with Norton losing weight and Pitt working out and becoming tan.[25] Tyler Durden, who initially embarks on a journey with the narrator in desiring "real experiences" like actual fights,[24] becomes a Nietzschean model in possessing the nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems.[29] Tyler, who represents the Id with his impulsive nature,[15] conveys an attitude that is seductive and liberating to the narrator and the followers. Eventually, Tyler's initiatives approach the point of being dehumanizing,[29] with Tyler using a megaphone to order around members of Project Mayhem in a similar fashion to the approach of Chinese re-education camps.[15] The narrator pulls back from Tyler and retreats from what Tyler is going toward. Instead, the narrator ultimately arrives at a middle ground between his conflicting selves.[17]