In Fight Club, the narrator starts out alone, someone who vicariously attends various support group meetings. Then through a chance meeting with Tyler Durden they begin building an underground fight club of other presumably solo men, even creating a network of similar clubs across the country. But by the end it appears as though the narrator no longer needs this club and has found a true friend in Marla Singer.
The parody is that instead of working-class Rocky, with his impressive physique and noble aspirations to make it to the bigtime, the narrator is a skinny office worker who aspires to degrade himself in unsanctioned basement brawls.
I suppose with any sufficiently complicated story, one could find either pattern, or maybe even both patterns.
Oh, I see that, both the inversion and the movement from solitude to companionship! Nice!
I think you're right about both patterns in "any sufficiently complicated story," too. Carriger talks a lot about that as well, about the potential to borrow from both.
Could Fight Club also be seen as a kind of parody of Rocky?
Ooh, how do you think? I feel like narratively they're so different. (Except for the punching obviously)
In Fight Club, the narrator starts out alone, someone who vicariously attends various support group meetings. Then through a chance meeting with Tyler Durden they begin building an underground fight club of other presumably solo men, even creating a network of similar clubs across the country. But by the end it appears as though the narrator no longer needs this club and has found a true friend in Marla Singer.
The parody is that instead of working-class Rocky, with his impressive physique and noble aspirations to make it to the bigtime, the narrator is a skinny office worker who aspires to degrade himself in unsanctioned basement brawls.
I suppose with any sufficiently complicated story, one could find either pattern, or maybe even both patterns.
Oh, I see that, both the inversion and the movement from solitude to companionship! Nice!
I think you're right about both patterns in "any sufficiently complicated story," too. Carriger talks a lot about that as well, about the potential to borrow from both.