“If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.” (pages 48-50) Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk that eventually made it to Hollywood. The book revolving around an unnamed insomniac and his alter ego, movie projectionist, Tyler Durden, was inspired by a camping trip Palahniuk took in which he came back bruised up and swollen. Our unnamed procrastinator is a recall coordinator who gets so bored with his same everyday life that he comes down with an intense case of insomnia. After a doctor tells him that he should go to parasite and cancer support groups to see what real pain is like, he listens, and oddly enough, he enjoys it. The support groups help him cry like a baby and eventually sleep better than babies do. His everyday life causes him to be a bit delusional in which he creates his alter ego and creates and promotes fight clubs all over the country. Fight clubs are used in a way to bring men together as their own union and leave everything else behind to eventually dedicate their lives to Project Mayhem. In this disturbing, yet mind blowing novel, Palahniuk uses rhetoric mostly by pathos and logos to show how Tyler, the narrator, and Palahniuk try to bring back that sense of manliness to the world with Fight Clubs and Project Mayhem.

     In the book Fight Club the narrator meets a new friend, Tyler Durden, on an airplane flight and the author makes it known that the narrator knows anything that Tyler knows. Tyler convinces the narrator to start and join a fight club, Tyler puts him through torture, and he eventually starts Project Mayhem: the project that will restart everyone’s credit and make everyone start from scratch.  Tyler eventually becomes close, maybe too close, with the narrator’s enemy, Marla Singer. Marla goes to all the support programs the narrator went to for the same reasons. Marla and Tyler soon begin having sexual relations. However, we soon find out that Tyler isn’t really just a friend; in fact, he is the narrator’s created alter ego. Tyler is everything that the narrator could never be, but wanted to. He was whitty, charming, brave, and attractive. The narrator uses his own pathos to attempt to create a a sense of his own super self. Without the sense of emptiness and loneliness the narrator tends to have, insomnia, Tyler, and Fight Clubs are never created. Does a group of men following one person, obeying all of his rules, and reaking havok on a city because he says so seem to make you manly? Is it manly to create an alter ego so you lose a sense of emptiness? It seems that the narrator needs to rely on someone else to feel welcome and to help him sleep. Is that what makes a man a man?

     Palahniuk tries to use his novel and the magic of rhetoric to show that the men of the world have lost their “manliness.” He shows that the men can have a bond through physical contact and competition. Instead of being worried about material things or girlfriends, they buy a house together and make bombs. According to Tyler, the narrator, and Palahniuk, these are things that masculine men do. This is an attempt at logos saying that it is only logical that men act this way to be manly. Palahniuk uses disturbing forms of rhetoric to show that the narrator and Tyler are the strongest form of men; those who rebel the law, cause pain to one-another, and threaten their bosses and strangers. This novel is completely based on pathos. This book is all emotional, whether it is good or bad. This book gives you feelings of confusion, excitement, and nervousness. Palahniuk’s use of pathos in this novel is used throughout the entire novel.

     This is book is an extremely emotional novel that uses forms of rhetoric to show that men these days have lost their masculinity and toughness. Eventually, the narrator realizes that he himself is Tyler and amazingly shoots himself to rid of Tyler. Palahniuk tries to use logos to show that men have lost their masculine lifestyles and uses Tyler to bring it out of all the men in Fight Club. Pathos is used everywhere and anywhere in this novel. Without Palahniuk’s use of pathos in this novel, it would be hard to keep attention in this rhetoric novel.