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.