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Symbolism in the Movie Fight Club

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Symbolism

Soap"With enough soap, we could blow up just about anything."
'Tyler was full of useful information.'
-Tyler and the Narrator

Erika writes: When the narrator first meets Tyler, Tyler declares that he is a soap salesman, although Tyler has various other occupations including a night-time movie projectionist and a waiter. Tyler, however, most identifies himself with the job of selling soap, thus lending weight to the symbolic importance played by soap in the movie. Tyler calls soap "the foundation of civilization" and tells the narrator that "the first soap was made from the ashes of heroes". He also uses lye, a chemical ingredient of soap, to introduce the narrator to the pain of "premature enlightenment." In this role, soap is …show more content…

if someone had picked up the phone when the Narrator dialed, it would be harder to understand that he hallucinated it. But having the phone ring on its own would be easier to imagine. (Or maybe it was just that Tyler got a thrill out of talking about sixty-nining the Narrator. . . self-improvement and all that.) Re the second, I don't think that Tyler had actually just walked in; I think he just said that.

Tyler's Cloths"It was a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day, then tossed it."
-Marla

A large part of Tyler's symbolism comes from his clothing. While the Narrator dresses conservatively, even after he abandons his old life, Tyler's clothes are always outrageous. His "business attire" consists of a white suit in which he looks more like a pimp than a businessman; his jacket is red leather, his choice of shirts is unusual to say the least, and his pants always seem a couple sizes too big for him and are worn low on his hips. A few articles of clothing carry more symbolism than others.

The Pink GlassesTyler almost always wears wire-rimmed glasses with pink lenses. The obvious symbolism of "rose-colored glasses" is undermined by his perverted vision of a perfect world. What Tyler sees through his glasses is a faulty world where the common man is downtrodden and his masculinity repressed. His utopia is a world of violence where pain is freedom and

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