“After Tyler and Marla had sex about ten times, Tyler says, Marla said she wanted to get pregnant. Marla said she wanted to have Tyler's abortion.”
These words signify to me some of the most important characteristics of both Marla and of Tyler. So much of their world view can be contained within such a short sentence.
Firstly, when people are having casual sex, the aim is NOT to get pregnant. Boys are taught that it’s the worst consequence of sex. No one says that with nonchalance. But Marla says it with carefree abandon. Do Tyler and Marla have a relationship? It doesn’t seem so. In fact, the relationship the Narrator has with Marla seems to have more substance (even though Tyler is a part of his subconscious, for most of the book we are unaware of this fact.)
However, when we realize at the end of the novel that Tyler and the Narrator are in fact the same person, Marla’s idiosyncrasies and her nymphomania make a lot more sense, as does her destructive relationship with Tyler.
Another aspect is that abortion in not exactly spoken about in an everyday “oh-i-had-one-over-my-lunchbreak” manner in conventional society. We may fight for the rights to have it over and over; we have pro-life, pro-choice, pro-women rallies all over the world. But wait, have you had an abortion? Well then, society condemns you. Think about the stigma attached to it.
Now Marla uses a typically romantic gesture to express how she would like to get pregnant and then have Tyler’s abortion. Her non-conformity oozes out of her every pore. "You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."
Interesting, since Marla isn’t using condoms (surely that goes against her motive?)
Marla Singer is the girl every emo-kid hopes to grow up and be like. She’s sexy, carefree, depressed, interesting and completely the opposite of the skinny super-sluts we’re supposed to adore. She keeps her mother’s fat as an insurance policy so that she can have lip implants later, and she steals jeans from laudromats to sell for food money.
Any girl who’s ever dreamed of being rebellious, at some point, wanted to be Marla Singer.
Which brings me to Tyler. Tyler uses his cocksure, don’t-care attitude, his disregard for capitalism and for the consumer-driven America, and his ability to just be a man to undermine and mock the typical structure within Western culture. His commentaries on God, the generation of men brought up by women, freedom and letting go of things that don’t matter inspires the reader to want to watch his every move. We want Tyler to splice porn into family movies and to urinate in the soup. Trapped in a society where deviant behaviour is frowned upon and discouraged, it is easy to understand why someone like the Narrator would create an alter-ego who lives out all these acts of rebellion to deal with all the repressed desires he himself feels. Evidence of this is seen by the fact that thousands of people wrote to Palahniuk after the film was released to tell him that many of Tyler’s pranks had already been pulled and that they were performing their own little acts of rebellion all over America. Even though by the end of the film, he is the patriarchal God-like father to his army of space monkeys (supposedly what he fights against), Tyler embodies a new structure where anarchy replaces capitalism and where we’d rather be free than own a condo full of condiments.
"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us.
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