“Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk: Protagonist has “split personality,” but author’s Afterword about writing novel does not mention multiple personality.

There are two major issues in this novel: the protagonist’s multiple personality and the fight clubs.

The author’s Afterword does discuss the fight clubs. Palahniuk says, “The whole idea of a fight club wasn’t important. It was arbitrary…The fighting wasn’t the important part of the story” (1, p. 213). Which would leave multiple personality as the basic reason that this novel was written.

The novel is explicit about the protagonist, who ultimately says: “I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil?” (1, p. 196). Why, then, is the issue of multiple personality not even mentioned in an author’s Afterword about why and how the novel was written? It is a remarkable omission.

In many past posts, I have used the terms “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” to refer to multiple personality that was present in a novel for no apparent reason except that it probably reflected the author’s own psychology. However, since multiple personality is integral to Fight Club and is explicitly acknowledged in the text, those concepts would not apply here. Will I have to coin another term for Palahniuk’s omission in his Afterword? Maybe not.

It is as if the person who wrote the Afterword were not the same person who wrote the novel: the former a person who does not think multiple personality worth mentioning, the latter a person with a great interest in it. The omission in his Afterword implies the author’s multiple personality.

1. Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club [1996]. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.