What Does The Ending Of Fight Club Really Mean?

Resolving A Masculinity Crisis

Why, of all the people the Narrator decides to create as an imaginary friend, would he invent Tyler Durden? Why would he cook up this fantasy that allows him to reconnect with his masculine side, form a brotherhood of raging pugilists and slake his secret appetite for destruction (he may not realise it, but there's a reason why the Narrator got himself a job observing violent wreckages)? The Narrator is consciously suffering from a quarter-life crisis, where he's bored at work, bored at home, unable to sleep, imagining a better life. Subconsciously, however, he's looking for a way to feel like a man again - it's all part of being a member of a society in which chiselled Calvin Klein models are plastered on the sides of public transport, where life is so sterile, safe and pre-packaged that man's hunter-gatherer instinct is left neglected.

The way the Narrator deals with his personal masculinity crisis is to slowly become Tyler Durden, and to engineer a situation in which he can feel like his actions have an impact, in which he can prove his dominance, in which he can "destroy something beautiful", like Jared Leto's unfortunate Angel Face. In that particular moment, the film's most stomach-churningly brutal, you can see the modern man getting in touch with his inner caveman and - disturbingly - finding some kind of peace. For the film's finale, you find the Narrator at last deciding to turn his back on that lifestyle. He wants freedom, he wants excitement, but not at the cost of more Robert Paulsens; his definitive statement is pulling the trigger inside his own mouth, and blasting his violent side - the Tyler Durden side - out of there (though it's likely not totally gone - the subliminal penis at the end of the film may suggest that Tyler remains part of the Narrator, still inserting rogue imagery as a way of reminding him his animal id is still there).