Does Fight Club Follow the Same Plot Line as Groundhog's Day?

1. Phil leads us to believe that through honing one’s skills and becoming kinda and compassionate, life has meaning and the pattern of monotony is broken. Does Fight Club follow the same plot line?

Phil Conors is put through the same day for years, as evident through the skills he learns.  His predicament can be considered the perfect experiment, where there is only one variable, himself. What does Phil feel like doing today?  Fight Club begins on a similar note. We find Jack trying to discover who he is by going to many different self help groups. Day in and day out, it’s the same thing. There might be a different self help group, but the all appear to have the same general feel to them. When I first saw this movie, with the name Fight Club, I was initially under the impression that this was going to be about a man who was in a fight for his life by going to all of these different clubs.  That by repeating his actions and going to these clubs he could come out a different person, as seen in Groundhog's Day. 

However, Jack wants more than that, and this breaks the pattern developed in Groundhog's Day.  Jack wants to define his life in a new way.   He finds himself creating an imaginary friend of sorts, which is part himself, part who he has always dreamed of being. The strange thing is, he is not aware that this friend is imaginary. This adds to the complexity of finding himself. There is an added variable to himself, who he is, and who he desires to be. This desire to break free of societal norms.  It becomes a driving force.  This imaginary being brings Jack to do things he normally would never had done. Which leads the question, how often do we do things we wouldn’t normally do due to pressure from  real or imaginary beings?  Do we believe that doing these things we will find ourselves, or are we doing it to please others?  Sometimes it would appear that society is an imaginary being. It’s not a real person, and yet it imposes rules. It would appear that Jack is fighting fire with fire, or an imaginary version of himself versus the imaginary rules created by society. 

So which way should you go about discovering your true identity? Though erosion of the self through day after day of the same things or through painstaking changes made through drastic movements? Both seem like true extremes at opposite ends of the spectrum. Life for most people exists somewhere between. However, it would seem that certain situations call for one method over the other. The foundation for school teaching is based more on the Groundhog's Day method. Through constant repetition, a concept can be learned. It reminds me of learning multiplication in the third grade. The constant repetitive viewing of flashcards until the task was learned. Then a new task was assigned. On the other hand, how we deal with crisis situations is much more the Fight Club method. It is said that one’s true identity is found in these circumstances, and perhaps the saying is right.