Chuck Palaniuk’s Fight Club, published in 1996, depicts a tale of a jaded middle-class worker’s intense discontents through a non-linear, pseudo-schizophrenic perspective as the protagonist’s sense of identity is split by social stratification, consumerist commodification and his anxiety of manhood, which result in a series of anarchic sabotages against commercial constructions performed by the cult Fight Club. George Bataille mentions in his notable essay The Accursed Share that expenditure is un-avoidable in the capitalistic society since “the circuit of cosmic energy” has to seek a way to expend in excess, same is violence or non-procreative sex. 1980s is the decade when the discussion of postmodernity permeated with topics as human alienation deteriorating into personal fragmentation. The nineties coming after the cynic, materialistic eighties is a decade populated by slackers who recuperate the seventies sass of anti-establishments. And that is the time when Palahniuk’s Fight Club releases. Universally sentiment is an inevitable human emotion, but in a de-humanized society which demeans the course of sentimentality, how shall you vent your sentiments appropriately? And suppressed sentiments shall regurgitate and reincarnated into a relentless wave of expenditure as volcano finally erupts after denying itself proper emission for a long while.

Sentiment is also a quintessential human emotion which needs to be channeled out through catharsis as ancient Greek Tragedies serve its rinsing effect to the audience. David Punter mentions the idea that popular fiction provides the society with temporal nurtures toward the wounds inflicted by industrialization/modernization. Fight Club in the nineties is the work as such serving its nurture to the reading public through its non-catharsis since sentiment has been made obsolete in the postmodern stage as the wishes of apocalyptic expenditure have been embodied through shock which functions as a substitution of catharsis. In a brief, anarchy here also performs as the expression of sentiments through a poise of non-sentiment despite this expression of sentiments could only be made through fictionalized apocalypse which will never been put into actuality. In other words, the reader is simply satisfying his/her ravenous appetite for destruction in a surrogate form while society remains its status quo as Starbucks maintains its monopolization of global markets. Conclusively, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is merely an attitude of wish-fulfilling sentiments devoid of any activist agency to impose any concrete, actual change upon the society, i.e. a nurture for slacker youths’ wounded sentiments.