refers to the “state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings
towards some object”. Such interpretation is embodied most conspicuously through the
protagonists of Fight Club. Throughout the book, the two protagonists, who live under the
circumstance of conflicting influences, undergo the process of sheer ambivalence and
possess the ideology keen to capture ambivalent aspects of being. Initially, the anonymous
narrator lives under the overwhelming influence of the support group, where the most
intimate connection with death and fading of vitality brings him an exhilarating vacation
out of an awfully bitter life (Palahniuk, 18). Such sheer contrast between the darkest and
brightest moment of being reveals the need for the experience of ambivalence while one
lacks a definite goal in an aimless life, which is epitomized by the life of endless hard
work in the book (Palahniuk, 18). Then Tyler emerges and establishes Fight Club, giving
rise to a scene in which the narrator sits in a decent office with decent people doing decent
presentations, but himself sitting with the most indecent look with “a black eye and half
his face swollen from the stitches inside his cheek” resulting from the most primitive act
of violence (Palahniuk, 47). Also, holding the conviction that manufacturing perfume kills
whales and that “most people have never seen a whale (Palahniuk, 83), Tyler causes the
Madam “crying and bleeding, curling against the toilet” (Palahniuk, 84), the act once
executed to penalize the wicked but eventually serves as wicked on the innocent people. It
is through such conflicting and paradoxical experience that the narrator proceeds a life
with ambivalent beliefs, which contain the desire for both peace and violence and the
simultaneous feeling of both optimism and pessimism. For instance, the narrator is plead-
ing for god’s salvation (Palahniuk, 166) while simultaneously wreak havocing upon
civilization in Project Mayhem through his secondary personality; the narrator lives
carelessly in degradation but is as well aspiring for a bright side of everything by shooting
Tyler in the head. However, the most striking ambivalence in the being of the protagonists
is their perception for life and death as well as self-improvement and self-destruction.
Through the whims that “maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruc-
tion is the answer” (Palahniuk, 49), the narrator manifests his concurrent yearning for both
self-improvement and self-destruction. However, he eventually finds the right path for
himself through such ambivalence. For the notions of life and death, the narrator takes the
two concepts as mutually convertible and significant through conveying that “one day
you're thinking and hauling yourself around, and the next, you're cold fertilizer, worm