Linda Tobias

Hemingway's Code Hero and the Postmodern Everyman in Fight Club: the Drama of Identity in Hemingway's World and in David Fincher's Fight Club Linda Tobias

While making a fictional journey in Ernest Hemingway¿s realm one would be totally captured by the way in which the characters sometimes strive to endure the most dreadful circumstances life unwittingly generates. This is a world populated by a new type of fictional idol, a modern-day hero, who consciously directs his own life by following a certain code of survival. He is placed in a world of plain nothingness, where in some way looses the most important element of his existence¿ his identity. Ordinary characters¿ bullfighters, boxers, fishermen tend escape from the morally wounded world. It is interesting to follow the act of liberation of these protagonists in some of the short stories and novel signed by the great writer. And the paths lead to another stage of artistic manifestation, to Postmodernism, a celebration of decentralized ideas, where multiple versions of reality and identity can co-exist. Can we find the traits of the Hemingwayan Code Hero in a blockbuster movie like Fight Club? The director presents a fictional Everyman embodying the common crisis of the self, the most durable problem of this society.