Fight Club Quotation #1

Marla Singer: why do you do it (coming to support groups for sick people)?

The Narrator: I don't know, when people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you instead of just...

Marla Singer: instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.


   The narrator suffers from insomnia and starts to attend gatherings for sick people. He goes to meetings for people with testicular cancer, alcohol addiction, and tuberculosis pretending to be one of the victims, and finds himself being relaxed and that he could sleep again. So he becomes addicted to these support groups. Then, Marla Singer appears and bothers the narrator like "the little scratch on his roof of his mouth that would heal if only he could stop tonguing it, but he cant." The narrator feels as if his own secret shelter has been exposed by his enemy.

    So why are both the narrator and Marla Singer obsessed with these support groups for dying people? People are selfish and really like to express themselves more than anything else. This is a natural thing. In order to survive in this competitive world, we have to be selfish. I mean, we must commercialize ourselves to jobs to get a job. This is why everyone likes to talk about themselves more than to actually listen to what others have to say. When my friend comes to me and asks something like "hey man, I'm meeting this girl tonight and what do you think I should talk about?" I say, "man, you don't have to talk about anything, just listen and respond to what she says." I say this because everyone likes to talk about themselves and be listened. And this is why the narrator and Marla attend the meetings for the sick every night. No one outside listens to them. No one really cares about the narrator's pain from insomnia or any other kind of agony he feels. People who really listen to them are the ones who suffer enormous pain themselves and have no hopes for the future.

  I'm not saying that there isn't anyone around us who truly feels and cares what we say, but I think our favorite conversation topic has been and will always be ourselves.

P.S. I could be worng.. and you guys might disagree.. but these are just my own thoughts on the scene.