Chuck Palahniuk, _Fight Club_

 HOW CAN THIS NOVEL be 27 years old this year? That means I must be...never mind.

So...one of our senior majors is writing her thesis on this novel. I suppose you already know that the novel's darkly charismatic anarcho-pugilist, Tyler Durden, turns out to an alternate identity of the put-upon, pushed-around, and nameless narrator, who may be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. At times, he "becomes" Tyler, without realizing it, and as Tyler he has an affair with a woman named Marla Singer, starts Fight Clubs, makes soap from the discarded fat of liposuctions, attracts disciples, and creates Project Mayhem, a small group devoted to random acts of disruption.

Our senior English major thinks Marla, too, is imaginary--an illusion conjured up by the narrator out of the same tangle of frustration, self-loathing, and helplessness that generated Tyler.

I had never heard of this reading before, but it's in circulation, according to our senior English major. Is this some kind of new orthodoxy about the novel?

In fact, our major even goes beyond the imaginary-Marla hypothesis and is convinced that the whole plot around Tyler--the Fight Clubs, Project Mayhem, and so on--is entirely in the narrator's head, has no substantial existence.

This seemed outlandish to me, so I re-read the novel...and some scenes do have a sort of implausibly surreal or dreamlike quality. Chapter 26, for instance, in which a bus-full of shaven-headed Tyler acolytes jump the narrator on a bus, or Chapter 29, when the narrator is having a final showdown with Tyler/himself atop a tall building, and Marla arrives along with "all the bowel cancers, the brain parasites, the melanoma people, the tuberculosis people" whose support groups the narrator and Marla have been crashing for months. Really? All of them?

So now I don't know. The whole plot has a somewhat fantastical, improbable air. Everyone in the novel seems more a type than a character. Maybe the whole thing actually is the narrator's pitiful power fantasy.

 What really worries me, though, is how this sustained-delusion interpretation could catch on a universal hermeneutic. Potentially, could we see any novel at all with with far-fetched and unlikely events enacted by characters who seems like types as the narrator's hallucination? I mean...that's almost all of them, isn't?