American Psycho

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Like his hero Joan Didion, Ellis believes that style is everything; what a shame he has written a book with so little of it. Canons of Transgression: Shock, Scandal, and Subversion from Matthew Lewis's The Monk to Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho" (PDF). Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time.

Eyes are said to be the keyhole to the soul, and by taking these away it gives a chilling image of a lack of identity. American Psycho doesn’t really break through the tedium until Bateman’s mask of sanity begins to slip. But it’s also hard to read because so much of it is boring, tedious, monotonous, and repetitive to the point of perversity. His consumer, artificial self, proceeding in society as a wealthy consumer would live and spend his income, versus his natural self, who, instead of spending money, would hunt and prey on the weak and vulnerable, usually women, whom he deems expendable.

At the end of the story, Bateman confronts Carnes about the message he left on his machine, only to find the attorney amused at what he considers a hilarious joke.

There is a lack of detail with Bateman in this image, we only have a silhouette which could represent that he’s out of touch with normality, and has lost touch with himself. Ellis was seen as defending Trump – despite saying that he was not Trump supporter – in certain passages, and also took Roseanne Barr and Kanye West’s sides. He introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations and on several occasions openly confesses his murderous activities to his coworkers, who never take him seriously, do not hear what he says, or misunderstand him completely—for example, hearing the words "murders and executions" as "mergers and acquisitions". This approach focuses on the general image we have on Patrick Bateman (the main character in American Pyscho). Part of this is accomplished by making Bateman the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, a madman who regularly describes things that could only exist in the fevered imagination of a confessed lunatic.One is Tom Cruise, who lives in the penthouse of his building and who he fumblingly compliments for his performance in Bartender (which Bateman mistakes as the title for Cocktail). And the crazy thing is that the mind-numbing first hundred pages of the book has little actual violence. The film starred Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, the anti-hero of the novel who is a materialistic yuppie who leads a secret life as a serial killer.