The influences behind Fight Club

1996

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk

Late 20th-century American. United States. Written in English.

Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel follows an unnamed insomniac office worker who, with the anarchic Tyler Durden, founds a bare-knuckle fight club that grows into a terrorist cult, before Tyler turns out to be the narrator's other self. It is written in a clipped, repetitive minimalist style learned in Tom Spanbauer's workshop.

Where it came from

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1886

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson

Victorian. Scotland. Written in English.

A respectable doctor releases a violent second self through a drug, and the two identities are revealed to be one man.

What it handed down

To Fight Club (1996)

Thematic kinship, probable.

The twist that Tyler Durden is the narrator's own violent alter ego belongs to the doppelganger tradition Stevenson made famous, in which a repressed respectable man releases a lawless second self. The debt is to the convention rather than to a stated reading.

Where it came from

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1839

William Wilson

Edgar Allan Poe

American Romanticism. United States. Written in English.

A dissolute narrator is shadowed all his life by a double with his name, whom he finally stabs, killing himself.

What it handed down

To Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Thematic kinship, probable.

Poe's tale of a man haunted by a double, whose murder of the double is his own death, set the pattern Stevenson followed in Jekyll's suicide that kills Hyde. Stevenson read and wrote about Poe.

Where it came from

An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron, Washington Irving 1835

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An Unwritten Drama of Lord ByronWashington Irving

1835

An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron

Washington Irving

American Romanticism. United States. Written in English.

A short sketch of a Byron plot idea in which a libertine is pursued by a masked figure who proves to be himself.

What it handed down

To William Wilson (1839)

Direct source, well documented.

In an October 1839 letter Poe told Irving that 'William Wilson' was based on Irving's sketch of a Byron plot, in which a libertine is shadowed by a masked figure who proves to be himself. Poe developed the idea into a full tale of the double.

Where it came from

The line stops here: irving presents it as an anecdote of a plot Byron described, not a literary source.

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Where it came from

What it handed down

To Fight Club (1996)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Where it came from

What it handed down

To William Wilson (1839)

Where it came from

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