Chuck Palahniuk Extract For Summ

Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996) London: Vintage, 2006. From Ch. 6, p. 50-51.
Fight club is not football on television. You arent watching a bunch of men you dont know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identication. After youve been to ght club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex. Fight club gets to be your reason for going to the gym and keeping your hair cut short and cutting your nails. The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says. Like Tyler says, even a snufe looks pumped. My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didnt know. When I got a job and turned twenty-ve, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didnt know, so he said, get married. Im a thirty-year-old boy, and Im wondering if another woman is really the answer I need. What happens at ght club doesnt happen in words. Some guys need a ght every week. This week, Tyler says its the rst fty guys through the door and thats it. No more. Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a ght. This guy mustve had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete oor until my teeth bit ope n the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the oor, Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the oor, and Tyler says, Cool. I shake the guys hand and say, good ght. This guy, he says, How about next week? I try to smile against all the swelling, and I say, look at me. How about next month? You arent alive anywhere like youre alive at ght club. When its you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight club isnt about winning or losing ghts. Fight club isnt about words. You see a guy come to ght club for the rst time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. Theres grunting and noise at ght club like at the gym, but ght club isnt about looking good. Theres hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gastby (1926) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950. From Ch. 3, p. 42.
By seven oclock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five -piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each others names. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light. Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Grays understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

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Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996) London: Vintage, 2006. From Ch. 6, p. 50-51.

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