Natalie HackettMay 2014 English LitThe Great Gatsby and Fight Club: between two hyper-masculine narratives in American capitalist consumer cultureChuck Palahniuk wrote an afterword for the paperback edition of Fight Club, in which he indicates his novel was primarily an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: “Actually, what I was writing was really The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was an "apostolic" fiction, in which a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And a man, the hero, is shot dead” (Palahniuk 215). Much could be written about the similarities and contrasts between these two novels. Beyond this simple similarity in plot, both novels provide powerful social commentary on the state of American culture and the harmful impact of capitalism on the individual during their respective times. The Great Gatsby was published in the 1920s and Fight Club in the 1990s, providing two similarly written literary snapshots of American society at opposite ends of the twentieth century. The temptation is to analyze and compare these novels in terms of American consumerism in different times, of an individual's search for personal identity in the increasingly conformist capitalist structure, or to focus on literary aspects, such as character and narrative structure. However, these obvious topics seem secondary to an overall thematic similarity. Both novels are masculine narratives, in which the male protagonists (Jay Gatsby and Tyler Durden) and narrators (Nick Caraway and an unnamed narrator) run towards or away from one of two versions of hyper-masculinity. One version is that of the wild, angry, sexual and violent fighter who uses the brute force of his body to crush... half the sheet of paper... during the reading and also from the film adaptation. I don't know the reason, but maybe it has to do with the American cultural perception of the middle class, IKEA shoppers are predominantly white, just as the intelligent minds of the resistance/criminality are also perceived as white. In the end, both protagonists, Gatsby and Tyler Durden, die. We find out later that Tyler Durden and the unnamed narrator are two different personalities of the same man, so they both die. Their end is tragic and violent. These men never achieve the masculinity or authenticity they endlessly pursue. They find no peace or even meaning. They never seem to form truly intimate bonds with other humans. Their relationship with material wealth consumes them in one way or another, and this is the ultimate conclusion about what American consumer culture does to the individual man..