Warning: This page contains spoilers.
"You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis." To most Americans, these words caste a pall of depression. We want to identify with these things, don't we? What would we be without our jobs? Our money? Our things?
In The Fight Club, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) leads a discontented yuppie (Ed Norton) on a journey through which he sheds everything he owned or which owned him in a quest for absolute freedom. "It's only when you've lost everything that you're free to do anything." First, he loses his apartment and moves in to a condemned squat-style house with Tyler. Next, he loses his physical integrity through fist fights which leave his face swollen and battered. He wears these badges of his fight-club activities proudly as he carries on at his job as if it weren't already obvious that he was no longer of them.
Before he meets Tyler, working in a job he doesn't respect, the narrator suffers a prolonged bout of insomnia until becoming a regular attendee at support groups for people with really horrible problems like testescular cancer, where he can wallow in their sorrows and somehow overcome his isolation, sobbing in the arms of other desperate people. At these support groups, he meets Marla, another "tourist" like himself taking refuge from her isolation in the borrowed tragedies of others.
He meets Tyler during a business flight. Tyler seems the least likely companion for him. He is a clean-cut yuppie and Tyler is grungy and brash. Shortly after they meet, his apartment is destroyed in an explosion and his descent to the Underworld begins in earnest.
In the support groups, he had learned guided meditation to help deal with pain. (Most of the groups are for people with terminal illness.) But he isn't looking for an escape from pain. He seeks it out. Accepting that he is not his possessions and looks to see what he is. Fighting seems to offer the answer. Tyler tells him that by fighting, he can really come to know himself.
He learns to be comfortable in the grungy atmosphere of Tyler's squat. He comes to relish the scandalous appearance he makes at work, which is his badge of alienation and separation. "I'm free and I'm not playing your game," proclaims his bruised and battered face and body. He and Tyler are soon off on many an adventure such as when they steal fat from a lyposuction clinic because human fat makes the best soap. "That way, we can sell them back their fat asses."
Then, one day, Tyler puts a corrosive chemical on his hand which he wet with a kiss. The chemical burns him severely, causing the greatest pain he has ever experienced. His mind scrambles for the guided meditations he has learned. Tyler commands him to stop it. He tells him to be here now and experience the pain, not run away from it. When it's over, Tyler congratulates him on having almost hit bottom.
A new phase of his descent to the bottom begins when Tyler starts admitting disciples with whom he begins building an army which combines elements of a strict Buddhist temple and Marine boot camp. As the Buddhists do (according to Tyler, at least), they keep new would-be recruits waiting on the doorstep while they throw as much discouragement at them as possible. If they stick it out, they're admitted. The principle trait required of the soldiers is robot-like obedience which causes him and Tyler to refer to them as "space monkeys."
"Operation Demolition," as Tyler calls his latest project, seems to have set aside the values of freedom and individuality he once so highly touted. Nihlism becomes his god. The army is a rigid, culty institution. It's goals are to force economic primitivism on the rest of society, thereby disregarding the humanity of both the soldiers and those who never joined.
In the beginning, the narrator said of his insomnia that nothing is quite real. One can look at this insomnia as a gateway into the unreality of his life with Tyler. Nothing is quite real when he can't sleep. Then he sleeps and encounters Tyler. Later in the movie, it is revealed that Tyler was something he actually dreamed up while asleep. he was Tyler Durden (which probably explains why he is never named in the movie). He acted as Tyler Durden and was recognized as Tyler Durden by his followers. Perhaps this strange twist of plot signifies that we are all the true instruments of the universe we inhabit. Even when another person is around to influence us, it is really our need that creates that person as s/he is. We find what we need in the other and make our image/interface with that other conform to our own agenda. The part of him that still identifies with his old self tries to fight the part that is Tyler but Tyler, of course, wins.