Fucking & Punching : Violence, Sexuality and Consumerism in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

Abstract

This thesis aims to give a comparative reading of the masculinities performed by the protagonistst in two contemporary American novels. Both American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis 1991) and Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk 1996) were initially met with critical disdain, not so much concerning their literary quality, but rather their thematic inclinations and superficial misogyny—although Fight Club went virtually unnoticed internationally until David Fincher’s adaptation starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter in 1999. One of the main points in this thesis is to show how the two novels are a part of a literary trend in the 1990s and early 2000s that problematizes an American masculine identity at the point of a crisis and how they use a subversive narrative technique specifically to address the sense of dread a postmodern loss of a central identity creates. Through this I will attempt to compare and contrast how the two texts portray and problematize the American masculinity crisis of the last two decades.