Book 2 Review #2 - Fight Club's cover

“With enough soap, we could blow up just about anything.”

               The bar of soap on the cover of Fight Club is one of the most memorable icons of popular culture. While it may seem strange and foreign to those unfamiliar with the plot, and may not draw any curious readers to inspect the back—which I’ve argued is the point of a cover—it holds a certain appeal to those who are aware of its relevance to the plot. Fight Club is home to many recurring themes and metaphors, but none are more distinct than the significance of soap.

When the narrator first encounters Tyler, soap is only briefly mentioned. We recognize it from the cover, but we aren’t provided with any insight to its significance just yet. Following one of the most famous sequences in the story, where Tyler burns a scar onto the narrator’s hand, he recites a story: he tells about the discovery of soap, and how it occurred in ancient times purely by accident. Soap is comprised of several ingredients, including fat. Humans washed their clothes in rivers prior to the discovery of soap, but they observed that one river held superior cleaning powers to the other. The reason for this is because the fat of human sacrifices, as well as the less significant ingredients, had all drained into the river purely by chance. “Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing,” he says, and the cover begins to make sense.

We begin to understand what soap represents in the novel; the sacrifice of others in order to better our society. Previously, we had known that it was an important ingredient to make stable explosives, and we could assume that Tyler’s intentions with manufacturing it were destructive, but we never knew what it represent. It is symbolic of the struggles of those who preceded us, and how, through suffering, they provided us with something to improve our lives, and how Tyler plans to carry that same torch in order to do the same for future generations. This is why it was chosen to be the focal point of the cover; it’s metaphorical of the entire plot.