Structure

Non-linear structure

The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk has a non-linear narrative structure. 

The most clear example of this non-linearity is the opening chapter, which starts in medias res with a scene which takes place near the ending of the story:

“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden”. (Chapter 1, 0%) 

The opening chapter may seem quite confusing to the readers, but also helps create tension, as readers would be curious to learn about the events which led to the narrator being on top of a building rigged to explode with a gun in his mouth.   

Most of the following chapters then act as one long flashback which gives a detailed explanation of the events that lead to the dramatic situation at the rooftop, which might be viewed as the climax of the story. 

Apart from the non-linearity of the overall plot structure, the novel contains many more examples of non-linearity, as the individual chapters also tend to skip back and forth in time. For example, Chapter 5 ends with a scene where Tyler asks the narrator to punch him in a parking lot, but Chapter 6 skips ahead to a future when Tyler and the narrator have already started the fight club concept and have been doing it for a while, before finally returning to the parking lot scene and explaining that their fight was how they had the idea for fight clubs. A similar time skip occurs when Project Mayhem is introduced, as the novel jumps directly to a point when the Project has be...