Dave Carnegie and Tyler Durdin

Fight Club and The Hiding Place: Dissatisfied members of corporate America and Christians hiding Jews. Similarity? Community. Differences? Opposition to self and opposition to brute force...at least that's what I thought about on my bike ride today, lost in the boonies of a nearby neighborhood.

I watched Fight Club for the first time last night after my brother told me I HAD to see the whole thing. This movie had always been one of those flicks that the rebel kids in high school loved, so I thought it be nice to see inside their minds. (I think I'm a late developing rebel...we all have a little of it.

I've been reading the Hiding Place for the second time in 13 years because I just put it on the reading list for my seventh graders. Too bad we can't compare Corrie's experience to Tyler Durdin's (psychotic ring leader/alter ego of Fight Club's narrator) in my classroom.

If you're still reading, here's the connection I'm getting at: Corrie Ten Boom mentions using Dave Carnegie's strategy of getting people to like you (talking in terms of their interests) and it helps her develop an ally in the Gestapo. Carnegie's principles date back to 1936, so can we note the irony that a 21st century reader experiences...human nature doesn't change? Neither do the roles of mommies and daddies. Corrie's dad leads the people to find peace in chaos, and so does Corrie's heavenly father. So what about Tyler Durdin? He doesn't just get people to like him, he gets them to fight him and still like him.

Accoriding the the book/movie, he also sees himself as:

*********"a generation of men raised by women"Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1999, p. 50.
because either their fathers left them, leaving them with no male model, or that "the narrator's opposition to emasculation is a form of projection, and that the problem that he fights is himself."(Maryville University of St. Louis professor Jesse Kavadlo, in an issue of the literary journal Stirrings Still)
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So this movie isn't just about guys fighting guys and that being really cool?
**********************************************Here's one more quote:

The mechanic says, “If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
and another exerpt...
How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.
Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.
Which is worse, hell or nothing?
Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.
“Burn the Louvre,” the mechanic says, “and wipe your a** with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.”

– Fight Club, page 141
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Call me crazy, but I had get the author's note: Palahniuk gives a much simpler statement about the overall theme of the novel, stating "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people."

I also think guys just like to fight. Isn't that what football is for?
For girls, I think it comes out in other things like white water rafting, testing the limits to feel more alive. But that's just me...

I wonder who Dave Carnegie would like to fight...