Fight Club

In Chuck Palahunik's novel, "Fight Club," the main character and narrator "Jack",

suffers two distinct psychological disorders. The cause of his dimentia may very well be the

nature of his job as an automobile recall coordinator. Jack travels the country to the sites

of horrfifc and gruesome car accidents, in order to determine if a recall is required. His

job is to assign a value to the human life, and in doing so, he develops an affinity for

violence, and often dreams of his own grisly death. Jack's pyschosis is fostered by severe

insomnia, that, not surprisingly, is cured only by daily trips to support groups for the

terminally ill. Jack revels in the suffering of those less fortunate then he. Jack says

repeatedly, " on a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will dop to zero,"

proving that iminent death quells his anxiety towards death. This system works for Jack,

until Marla Singer joins the support groups, and Jack is no longer able to enjoy his fellow

man's pain. Now thoroughly deprived of sleep, Jack has a psychotic break, that culminates in

his first encounter with Tyler Durden, and his ascension into schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is characteristically developed preceeding a traumatic event. The

disease creates delusions and hallucinations, visual or auditory, sometimes both. People who

suffer from schizophrenia display discrepencies in perception, disturbed thought, and

disordered thought process. People with the disease often have little to no intrest in other

people or the outside world. They predominantly focus on the events of their "mental life,"

because that is their reality. Judgement is greatly affected by the disease, as those

stricken with it display odd, irrational, and highly disorganized behavior. The

schizophrenic brain is subject to warped consciousness, as thinking, reasoning, and

judgement are victim to the sufferer's otherwise delusional reality. People with

schizophrenia have difficulty engaging in coherent conversation, as thoughts tend to

transition in mid sentence, and speech is often incomprehensible. People with the disease

often insert and repeat certain nonsensical phrases into speech. The diseased also exhibit

peculiar behavior as a result of their warped reality. An example of such behavior would be

wearing an excessive amount of clothing on hot days, or catatonia, reamining in one position

for hours on end, with no recollection of the time afterwards. In rare cases, some patients

have exhibited a type of "waxy flexibility" while catatonic, where their bodies can be

placed in various positions that they will hold until the catatonia is broken.

Schizophrenics experience hallucinations that make living normal lives near impossible.

These hallucinations can manifest themselves in visual,auditory, olfactory, or tactile

forms.