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Joel Yann

Professor Lemerond

ENG 182

18 April 2022

Tired of Being Tired

For hundreds of years men were expected to show no feeling. This expectation is now

known as toxic masculinity. The lack of emotion causes mental unease and in serious cases

disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. This is showcased in Kurt Vonnegut’s

Slaughterhouse Five and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as the protagonists in both novels are

heavily challenged due to the suppression of their emotions. Both Slaughterhouse Five and Fight

Club use hyperbolic irony to examine how apathy and masculinity impact men and their ability

to show and experience emotions.

Billy Pilgrim is not well. After countless traumatic experiences in the war he comes home

to a society that does not care. He cannot show the sheer amount of grief and pain he has stored

up inside mainly due to the fact that there is no one who wants to listen. He is expected to be a

strong, fearless veteran, a true man among boys. However, that is not the reality of war.

Truthfully Billy is deeply scarred and needs serious help, the lack of which leads to his

hallucinations of time traveling and the infamous tralfamadorians. Every time he tries to tell

someone about these crazy experiences he has, getting abducted or how he knows a plane will

crash, he is dismissed as insane. Billy Pilgrim is repeatedly discouraged from sharing his

feelings, something that gradually builds, leading him to stop feeling emotion altogether and

dismissing everything that occurs in his life with his tag line, “so it goes.” This emotionless
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behavior exhibited towards all the things our society considers meaningful is shared with the

main character from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

Fight Club’s nameless protagonist, sufficiently dubbed the narrator, needs help. The first

two instances in which we are introduced to him sharply contrast, the first scene he has a gun in

his mouth and the second he is speaking with a therapist. There is no one thing that led him to

these positions, rather a melting pot of hundreds of little things that all culminated into him

slowly going crazy. Issues like the immorality of his job or his insomnia or how pointless all the

couches in his apartment are weigh him down more and more with each passing day. He goes to

his therapist only to be dismissed and told that if he wants to see real pain he should go to a

cancer support group. The harmful nature of telling someone how you are feeling and being

rejected because someone else is worse off is a key reason why men hate sharing their emotions.

The feeling of being second best or not as important haunts men, and in this scenario it shows

how damaged the narrator is, because he actually finds comfort in the company of the support

group. The irony is found in the mockery of Bob. He is a body builder who adds comedic relief

through the dark humor of him having boobs and no testicles. The fact that the narrator is happy

here shows how despicable his case is. His happiness is short-lived however, as when Marla

arrives the narrator begins to spiral again. This free fall leads to the creation of fight club, the

ultimate blend of toxic masculinity and apathy, a place where all your anger and frustration can

be healthily released by punching people in the face.

Masculinity, specifically the toxic type, is the idea that men should be strong,

independent, and carry the burden of life without showing any pain or hardship. This is

demonstrated to great lengths in both novels, especially Fight Club. Not only does the narrator

exude the traits of toxic masculinity, but others key characters as well including Tyler and all the
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members of project mayhem. The willingness to not only join a fight club, but also start a

terrorist group partially because it helps release tension and hatred at the world is incredibly

unhealthy and a great hyperbole for how men’s emotions are dealt with in our society today. The

satirical nature is that this whole ordeal only started due to a lack of therapy. Rather than finding

a healthy outlet for his depression and mental hardships the narrator bounces from cancer support

groups, to fight club, before finally landing at project mayhem. The idea that men are supposed

to suppress their feelings is dangerous and Palahniuk shows this through hyperbole and project

mayhem.

While apathy is addressed heavily through the narrator’s character arc, Slaughterhouse

Five uses it much more effectively. Through Billy Pilgrim’s journey we see a man so lost in his

own mind that he believes that everything he ever did, is doing, and will do have no meaning.

Therefore he just sits back and watches as an eternity of events flood by. Perhaps they are

predetermined and he is powerless to stop them, but he will never know because he never tries.

This apathetic approach to life is unhealthy and depressing, and the deterministic approach that

Billy Pilgrim takes to life is a hyperbolic example of feeling helpless in situations where effort

would make a difference.

It is evident that both Palahniuk and Vonnegut heavily lean on Bakhtin’s theories of

satire as many of them are visible in their stories. The one that appears most through both novels

is moral-psychological experimentation. Both Billy Pilgrim and the narrator embody the abstract

ideals that the authors are attempting to communicate. Apathy and masculinity are present in

both characters, with apathy being seen more in Billy and masculinity for the narrator. Both

characters are insane, and their conditions are explored through the use of satire. By adding

humor to their characters they become infinitely more relatable to the audience than they would
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as stoic psychopaths. By making them relatable to the audience Vonnegut and Palahniuk are able

to show real world issues, in this instance apathy and toxic masculinity, in ways that readers will

understand. The audience has to resonate with the protagonist for any message to be impactful

and the use of satire in an absurd, carnivalesque space allows this wonderfully.

In both Slaughterhouse Five and Fight Club the authors use satire and hyperbolic irony to

send a very realistic message to their audience. The idea is to teach that the idea of masculinity

and apathy being something inherently helpless is very wrong. We have autonomy over our own

actions. Nothing is predetermined and just because society expects men to look or act or feel a

certain way does not mean that it is required. By studying the narrator and Billy Pilgrim it is very

clear that neither of them are healthy people. A major reason behind this is their inability to share

how they really feel, to really let out their emotions and feelings in a healthy and beneficial way.

Vonnegut and Palahniuk expertly address very taboo topics and provide great satirical

commentary on issues that apply to everyday life in our ever changing world. They tell everyone

to never settle for being tired, it is ok to be human.

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Works Cited

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. Dark Horse Books, 2020.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Random House. 2009.