A Network Text Analysis of Fight Club

Abstract—Network Text Analysis (NTA) involves the creation of networks of words and/or concepts from linguistic data. Its key insight is that the position of words and concepts in a text network provides vital clues to the central and underlying themes of the text as a whole. Recent research has used an inductive or bottom-up approach to the question of theme extraction. In this paper we take a top-down or deductive approach in that we first establish prior expectations as to the key themes to be found in the text. We then compare and contrast the results of our network analysis with the results of literary and cultural analyses of the film Fight Club as reported in over four dozen other peer-reviewed publications. While our results are remarkably consistent with and complementary to results in those studies, our analysis permits something the others do not—an analytical framework for relating those underlying and central themes to one another. Index Terms—network text analysis, social network analysis, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, film criticism