The subtitle in this book is "a savage jouney to the heart of the American dream." I dont really understand how this represents the Amereican dream, unless the american dream is not what i thought it was. maybe i need to read farther or look deeper into the book.

The author frequently makes class and social status observations "...special guests of the GM nothing to good for the high rollers." this is obviously a sarcastic comment and afterwards he goes on to condemn the upper class. when he makes the comments however he always does it in a very back handed way. he never strait up says high rollers are pigs.

Its amazing how irresponsible the main characters are, they drive around Vegas "with a car full of marijuana and a head full of acid." this shows the characters disregard for authority and law. I'm not really sure why he so reckless although the story does indicate that he is depressed.

This book doesn't really fallow the common structure that most books do. their is little real conflict, most of it is just imagined by the main characters in their drug addled state. it sort of feels like the book has no direction. pretty much all that has happened is they have wondered around las Vegas doing a whole bunch of drugs.

"When speeding past a law enforcement officer it is neccessary to accelerate. When he pulls out behind you and turns on his lgihts, it is neccessary to turn on you blinker. This will confuse him, however it is to let him know you are looking for an appropriate place to pull over and talk." this is a perfect example of the zaney writing style Hunter thompson uses. Im not sure if he was drug addled when he wrote this or if he's rying to be clever.

I can relate to allot of cultural observations he makes. take this one for example. both their buggies were covered with ominous symbols: screaming eagles carrying American flags in their claws." although he never outright says it, it's pretty obvious that he thinks this is tacky. and i
couldn't agree more.

both characters seem very irritable and aggressive (probably because of the drugs.) like the scene where they are getting the shotgun mike, the attorney threatens to kill the store owner and burn down his house. also their is another scene where the author fires his driver just for making him spill his drink.

I wonder how this book could even be made into a movie. it doesn't really have enough substance that can be seen. most of it is observation which an pretty much only be read. I bet its allot different.

I wonder if this story is true. several people have told me that its and autobiography and several have told me that it's not. there are some really cool illustrations of the authors hallucinations. They're really sloppily drawn, kind of like a chicken scratch drawing from a third grader, but they're really cool. I wonder if that's what tripping is like.

The author seems very miserable... he is constantly on drugs to the point where he cant function. like when they're driving to Vegas he has to stop because he sees a flock of bats. also when he gets to the Mint hotel, he thinks that everyone is a reptile and the blood is all over the ground. I have read over a hundred pages and he is not sober in a single scene. they are also constantly paranoid about something, for example when they go to the motor cycle race, everyone has a gun, which scares them so they leave.

I think whats happening is that hes a journalist who's supposed to be writing about the Mint motorcycle race but i can't be quite sure. the authors writing style is very quirky and a Little hard to fallow. Allot like Kurt Vonnegut. He focuses on details and quirks that aren't really all that necessary to the story. he also uses amusing analogy's like "it was like trying to cover a swim meet in an Olympic sized pool filled with talcum powder instead of water.

fear and loathing in las vegas

I think the redeeming value of fight club is the theological aspect of it. The point of the book is that self destruction is the only way to start anew. the purpose of project mayhem was to destroy the world so we could start over from scratch. This may not sound practical but it would work theorhetically. If we looked back a million years from now we will either see that most life disappears suddenly (archaelogically sudden that is), or that life will thrive. Humans are really one of the largest influences on the planet.

This week I started reading fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Its supposed to be really good and i want to see the movie after i read the book.

My first impressions of the two main characters; the Narrator and his attorney, are that they are total druggys. "We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of

high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy
of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...etc" Its a bit hard tow discern reality from hallucination in this book butt basically a jounalist (and a very iresponsible one) and his lawyer are on their way to las vegas to do a task that hasn't been explained yet.

and i used to be such a nice person

Another sructural aspect of Palahniuk's writing that i have noticed is how he uses repitition through out the book. The narrator says "and i used to be such a nice person." after he freaks out on his boss and again sixty two pages later when he blackmails the head of the pressman hotel. He does this several times throughout the book. Its a really cool effect.



One thing iv'e noticed is that The narrator and Tyler are never in the same room with Marla (the narrators love interest). you can sort of see this in the movie but in the book it's much more obvious. When ever Marla leaves the room, Tyler magically appears. this must have to do with his multiple personality disorder.



I really like the soap idea. Its a very clever scheme. bassically what happens is people from project mayhem (the terrorist orginization thought up by Tyler) go to a medical wasted dump. there they gather up fat "liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest thighs in america." they use this fat to make soap (and glycerin for nitroglycerin). which they sell at twenty bucks a bar.



I think I want to do my annotated bibliography on the differences between fight club; the book, and the movie. I dont know if i would be able to coe up with enough sources though.

The actual fight club starts out when the narrator hits tyler Durden in the parking lot of a bar. "Both" men experience something they never have before. Tyler Durden sets up fight club in the basement of the bar. at first its just them two but it steadily gains popularity untill their are two many people for just one fight club, and they have to start setting up new ones in other bars.

The over all theme of this book is that self destruction is the answer. only when you have hit rock bottom can you be great. "it's only after you have lost everything that you are free to do anything." you can see this in the goal of project mayhem. The goal is to end civilization so it can become new again.

The narrator's "decline" is evident in a scene where his boss confronts him about a paper with the rules of fight club on it that he found. "I say, it sounds like some dangerous psychotic killer wrote this and this buttoned-down schitzophrenic could probably go over the edge at any moment in the working day and stlak from office to office with and armalite AR-180 carbine gas operated semiautomatic." This really shows you how much he's changed since the beggining of the book and turned into a monster.

the second rule is you dont talk about fight club

Chuck Palahniuk has a very wierd writing structure. he writes several one sentence paragraphs in a row.

"Death will commence in five.

Five, four.

Around her, parisitic life spray paints her heart.

Four, three.

Three, two."

Its kind of cool how he does this it speeds up the pace of the passage and allows him to change the subject frequently. Sometimes it's hard to fallow though.



Once the narrator meets Tyler Durden lots of crazy things start to happen. the craziest being that his apartment blows up. The narrator is on a buisness trip when it happens. The explanation given to him is that he blew the pilot light out on his stove which filled the room up with gas and when the bottom of his refrigerator got hot enough it exploded. This is when he moves in with Tyler durden.



One thing I dont really understand is how he interacts physically with Tyler Durden if he's just a hallucination. The scene where tyler pours lye on the narrators wrist to leave him a scar would be physically impossible without two people.

the first rule is you don't talk about fight club

This week I'm reading fight club. I've already ready seen the movie so I know the basic plot. I usually end up liking books alot more than the movie version but I have heard that the movie is better in this case. Its going to be interesting reading this book because i pretty much know what happens so I can look at the differences between the two. I can also look for foreshadowing in the story.

Chuck Palahniuk has a very dark writing style the first chapter is very morbid. The narrator is a depressed insomniac that goes to cancer support groups to cry and feel better about him self. so he's obviously screwed up. Reading about all 0f these terminally ill people is really depressing, reading about the narrator going to these support groups even though he isn't terminally ill is more depressing.

The first place I see fore shadowing is when he talks about Tyler Durden in chapter two. the narrator talks about waking up in several different airports. In between this he talks about Tyler's job as a movie projectionist. He constantly says "I know this because Tyler knows this" this is the first sign indicating he has a split personality.

I'm not totally sure but I think this is also foreshadowing that the narrator is skitzo. "in change overs you have two projectors and one projector is running. I know this because Tyler knows this. The second projector is set up with the next roll of film." This quote symbolizes how Tyler Durden and the narrator are two parts of the same thing.