I AGREE & I want to add onto this
just as a heads up, i’m still working my way through the novel, so all of my contributions are done in favor of the fincher adaptation & my personal analysis
me and my friends recently had a discussion about whether the narrator was actually arospec (aromantic or asexual) a few weeks ago, most prominently pinpointing at the scene where tyler explains his condition in relation to the narrator: saying he “looks like [how he wants to] look, fucks like [he wants to] fuck”, and within all other things, just how he is a liberated representation of the narrator’s inner and external desires. we did conclude that that may mean the narrator does implicitly feel attraction and just doesn’t exercise it, but as you mentioned in the tags aswell, tyler is just the culmination of everything the narrator thinks he has failed at as a result of his upbringing.
the narrator doesn’t necessarily want to live a reality where he can be romantically engaged with marla (or women as a whole), but more so just wanting to know he has the liberty to do so as he pleases. it’s why he projects it onto tyler instead of seeking it himself: tyler is essentially the canvas of what the narrator expects he should be like in a world where all arbitrary expectations of the capitalist realm are removed. because just as working a dull job scamming people out of insurance has its own standards and routine, so does tyler’s way of life: and one of the checkboxes that narrator in my opinion places is the right of sexual liberty. i’d even go farther to say this makes him MORE attracted to tyler than marla.
and addressing the major elephant i didn’t bring up yet: angel face and his character in its entirety is also a manifestation of narrator’s repression of his queer identity. even with the interpretation that tyler and the narrator once co-existed in each other’s lives, narrator takes the beating as a result of his jealousy and supposed abandonment by tyler (“i am jack’s inflamed sense of rejection”), for tyler can form close bonds with other people within the fight club and even endear them without it getting in the way of his constructed masculinity: a privilege the narrator does not believe he has since he is so used to masking both in the work environment and his supposed era of freedom. once it turns out that it was narrator both in the shoes of himself and tyler, the allegory with angel face becomes far more present. he destroys his face, something he felt attracted to, believing with enough violence he can conquer and destroy all of his unwanted homoerotic desires, becoming the ultimate face of repression as he gets rid of everything that throws him off of becoming the man he thinks he should be to set himself free.
tl;dr: fight club IS about repression (whether it is repressing your radicalization or your violence as a replacement for emotional intimacy) & what is defined as masculinity, so interpreting the narrator as gay makes for a far more nuanced story.
palahniuk (the author), is gay himself. this doesn’t mean that fight club is an explicit manifestation of his sexuality, as he stated that he wants his work to stand on their own, but anything that can be interpreted with homoerotic undertones could be within the original reading of the novel and his intentions.
fight club IS a jekyll & hyde story, a novel that is popularly now re-interpreted to be about the forced repression of queer desire and the criminalization of homosexual acts hence the labouchere amendment of 1885, which was imposed within the same years between the robert louis stevenson’s publication. this on its own could be its own post, but i wanted to sprinkle it in as a push to say it is not at all ridiculous to say narrator is gay.
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