IKEA Boys and Terrorists

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, printed single-sided, grade: 1,3 (A), Technical University of Braunschweig (English Seminar), course: 9/11, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, has blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. [...] My Haparanda sofa group with orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now. And I wasn t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue. [ ] It took my whole life to buy this stuff. [ ] Then you re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. Until I got home from the airport (Palahniuk 44 f.).As the narrator in Chuck Palahniuk s Fight Club comes home from a business trip, he realizes that his fancy IKEA nest has been blown to pieces by a bomb. The destruction of his home is the beginning of a quest for identity, a process that makes him the leader of an underground terrorist organization in the end.Fight Club gives insight to a social malaise that has gripped American men, it is the portrait of the nihilistic generation that is commonly referred to as Generation X. Palahniuk depicts the life of a man who grew up in a time without great wars, without a Great Depression. Hence, he is desperately trying to give his insignificant life a meaning since he cannot give it to a greater cause.This work discusses both Palahniuk s novel and the David Fincher movie that has been based on it with regard to what these works convey about terrorism and western culture. Furthermore, the impact of 9/11 on Fight Club is examined: how has 9/11 changed the perception of the novel and the movie?