Analysis of Fight Club’s Unreliable Narrator with Dancygier’s Cognitive Approach: Cognitive-Linguistics

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.3, University of Osnabruck (English studies), course: Cognition and Poetics, language: English, abstract: My analysis of Fight Club completely relies on the cognitive approach from The Language of Stories by the cognitive linguist Barbara Dancygier. Crucial to the understanding of this approach is that it is about meaning construction, or how we read stories and create meaning. Hence, it is not my interest to suggest a prescribed interpretation of how the story is intended to be read, but to accompany the process of how meaning emerges out of textual choices, such as grammar, lexicality or simple tense variations. The effect of my agentivity shall thus only be noticeable in my navigating through the story, not in its interpretation. The framework or toolkit that the discipline of cognitive linguistics provides is not in itself a way to understand stories but rather a scaffold that has to be enriched by means of blending, compression and conceptualization, which underlie the topology of the story. The acquaintance with these concepts is a requirement prior to reading this paper since I will not explicitly elaborate on them. Over the course of the analysis I will primarily focus on the representation of the narrator’s mind, but I will also try to find a balance between story-driving and linguistically important extracts in order to simulate the telling of the story in a miniature format. I want my analysis to not disrupt the original sequence of events, but follow the story of Fight Club by keeping in registry with its sequence.