Our culture is littered with unsaid rules, etiquette, and long-standing traditions of what is morally right, wrong, or beneficial for the greater whole. Literature skirts these boundaries nudging, prodding, and ultimately challenging these rules and guidelines of behaviour.

Audiences of true literature, are made more aware and prepared to judge for themselves the benefits, negatives, or hidden agendas of said rules. Literature gives us, in the words of Virginia Woolf, a “nugget of truth” to take home.

Directly falling into this class of literature is the satirical novel Fight Club, written by Chuck Palahniuk. Set in the grey cubicle filled skyscrapers of America, we follow a nameless narrator in his pursuit to “feel alive.” Palahniuk uses the initial state of the narrator, a man devoid of human emotions, to depict a harsh consumer driven reality to the audience. Happiness and self-fulfilment are one of the few things no amount of money can buy, in a culture which claims to have everything for sale. It’s a message integral to the novel’s attack on adverts, shops, and society - forcing audiences to evaluate their self-worth and level of satisfaction. Palahniuk masterfully reveals that true satisfaction and feeling alive isn’t dependent on your job or what you own, but lies in your own internal outlook on life - not the external forces acting on you.

The Unknown Citizen by W.H, Auden, written in the form of a dedication for a public monument, celebrates a life that, "had everything necessary to the Modern Man" - except, apparently, a name. It challenges the role of the individual in a modern society, revealing that while we may be building up the “greater whole” we’re forced to sacrifice the uniqueness of the individual. This citizen “held the proper opinions for the time of year, when there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.” In becoming unified with the greater whole and living by its rules and guidelines there is no room for diversity in thought or belief, forcing said citizens to cast aside their uniqueness and fall in line with everyone else's steps. “In the modern sense of an old-fashioned word he was a saint,” - not because he was holy but because he exemplified the desired values of his state, a state which followed a ‘straight and narrow’ set by their own accord.

True literature doesn’t give us cookie cutter answers, rather it forces audiences to ask important questions and evaluate their standing with the world. It challenges society’s rules and guidelines, guidelines about what behaviour will ultimately make us happy, what’s moral, and what we should strive to achieve. By making us question these rules, audiences are able to gain a greater appreciation and understanding for why rules are there, while also providing the ammunition required to create change.

By Matthew Woodfield