Afterword of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” calls novel featuring multiple personality an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

A new essay in today’s New York Times on Jay Gatsby (1) does not mention his probable multiple personality (search “F. Scott Fitzgerald” to see my past posts), but it does provide an excuse for me to add something I failed to note previously: a connection between The Great Gatsby and another novel I discussed, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

In Palahniuk’s Afterword to Fight Club, he says: “Really, what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction—where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero” (2, pp. 215-216). Obviously, the Palahniuk personality who is writing the Afterword is not consciously comparing the two novels in regard to multiple personality, but don’t be misled by that, because the personality writing the Afterword does not even mention that his own novel features multiple personality, as I noted in the following past post:

June 25, 2017

“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. But 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” (2, p. 213). Which would leave multiple personality as the basic reason that this novel was written.

The novel itself 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?” (2, 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…

Interpretation

One of Palahniuk’s personalities that was not in charge of writing the Afterword, but who did know that his novel was about multiple personality, may have realized that Tyler Durden and Jay Gatsby had the same psychological condition, and wanted to get that in.

1. Jesmyn Ward. “Jay Gatsby.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/books/review/jesmyn-ward-great-gatsby.html

2. Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club [1996]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2005.