In Robert Bly's book about exploring what it means to be male, Iron John, he wrote that modern men “are not interested in harming the earth or starting wars. There is a gentle attitude towards life in their entire being and lifestyle. But many of these men are not happy. . . They preserve life but not exactly give life. For Bly, modern men are forced to become docile creatures and slaves to the corporate lifestyle. Men have no major wars to take part in and from an early age they have been taught to suppress their inner urges to fight and seek conflict. They have learned that this will make them happy and that violence is never okay. Alternatively, Chuck Palahniuk's fictional novel Fight Club and David Fincher's film adaptation Fight Club construct a universe in which men break these rules. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The novel is told from the point of view of the narrator who suffers from a dissociative disorder. The narrator's alter ego, Tyler Durden, is representative of what the perfect male would be in the Fight Club universe. Tyler is personable, confident, and everything the narrator thinks he needs to be to be the perfect man . A man in the Fight Club universe is completely detached from the world around him, defies social norms and is dominant. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator lives a very normal life, but as time passes, he becomes detached from everything that has meaning. The only thing initially wrong with his life is that he suffers from insomnia. To cure his insomnia he attended support groups, and it was here that he took his first steps towards detachment. During one such encounter, while crying against a man's chest, the Narrator, “was lost in oblivion, dark, silent and complete. . . This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom” (Palahniuk 22). From the day of birth, men are told not to cry and to hide their emotions. Nothing stops men from crying except their own ego. In these support groups, the Storyteller is confident enough to break down his barriers, and this leaves him free to express his inner nature. Next, the Narrator needed to detach himself from his physical possessions, and to do this he had his alter ego Tyler blow up his apartment. After his apartment was destroyed, Tyler told the narrator that "the things you owned, now own you" (44). The Narrator is now homeless and without possessions, but he owns nothing. He had been freed from the bills, the house and everything else. The final step in letting go is to accept your death, so that you can be freed from your body. Tyler pours lye on the narrator's bare hand and tells him that “first you have to give up. First you must know, do not fear, know that one day you will die. . . It is only after losing everything that we are free to do anything” (Fincher). This is the step the narrator needed to accept that his life belongs to him. He breaks down his emotional barriers, destroys all his worldly possessions and accepts his own death. With nothing to constrain him, the Storyteller is free to do anything. Once detached from the world around him, the Storyteller can challenge social norms without fear of repercussions and come closer to becoming the perfect man. Life is full of external pressures to fit in with the rest of society, but part of what makes Tyler so appealing is his blatant disregard for fitting in. In the film version the narrator meets Tyler for the first time on a plane. In an attempt to do.