“I have been arguing that films have extra- heterodiegetic narrators who,
by focalizing through unreliable characters, are able to misreport
events—something that narrators in novels cannot do. In order to play
this argument out, let us return to Fight Club. In this film we
have a protagonist, his alternate personality, and his alternate
personality’s girlfriend, all of whom understand the world very
differently. There are surprisingly few analyses of this film’s
narrative perversions, but readings of other puzzle films suggest a
starting place. We can assume Chatman and Burgoyne would argue [End Page 89] that
Jack narrates the bulk of the film, as his delusions dominate it for
well over two hours (and in fact the protagonist is identified in the
credits as “the narrator”). And we can assume Currie would argue that
the implied author misleads us by suggesting that Tyler exists, though
careful attention to discrepancies would reveal him to be a figment of
Jack’s imagination. Neither of these explanations, though, is
persuasive. The first would require that Jack narrate events of which he
is unaware, and the second would require that there be discrepancies to
misinterpret, which there are not. Nevertheless, the film is
definitively unreliable, so where does the unreliability lie?”…cont’d