about medical, scientific, and philosophical theories that frequently contradict the principles
and idea on which Western societies are based” (10). As the narrator’s teacher in Fight Club,
Tyler’s purpose is to beat home the fact that concepts such as individuality, permanence, and
ego are a delusion. In understanding nondualism, which is an affirmation of the
interrelatedness with all things, one recognizes that accepting emptiness leads to wisdom and
compassion. According to the LankSvatSra Sutra, this understanding “is based upon the
recognition that the objective world, like a vision, is the manifestation of the mind itself; it
teaches the cessation of ignorance, desire, deed and causality" (qtd. in Goddard 283). Though
he teaches the “cessation of ignorance” through shedding “desire," Tyler, as a “manifestation
of the mind” of his creator, further problematizes the latter’s struggle for freedom by the doubly
dualistic nature of their relationship.
Nondualism and emptiness go hand-in-hand like the narrator’s trendy yin and yang
coffee tables which “fit together to make a circle” before the narrator blows up his condo upon
recognizing that “the things you used to own, now they own you” (33-34). Here we see that the
narrator has a cursory understanding that the cessation of suffering comes from divestiture; it
is not just “things” which trap us, though, it is also concepts, desires, and emotions—the
building blocks of ego. It is precisely this feeling of entrapment that opens the way for the
narrator’s creation of Tyler, whose identity seems to stem from a misguided sense of rugged
American individualism accentuated with catchy Zen one-liners. Depicted as a
Unabomberesque Thoreauvian Zen militia leader, Tyler turns his band of shaved-headed
“space monkeys” against the greatest cause of contemporary American suffering: the rampant
consumerism that feeds our simultaneously aggrandizing and dehumanizing sense of self as
we bungle through our “lives of quiet desperation.” According to Tyler, “You’re one of those
space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t
understand any of it, and then you just die" (2). Like Thoreau’s “laboring man” who toils at the
cost of living, and Marx’s proletarian who produces at the cost of owning, the modern space
monkey—“a generation of men raised by women”—lives an emasculated life devoid of agency,
self-respect, and self-knowledge (41). In an attempt to reignite these traits in a few random
men one night, the narrator pulls a gun on Raymond K. Hessel, a nighttime convenience store
clerk whom he threatens to kill unless he tells him what he wants to do with his life other than
“working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television” (147). Once
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