![](\"https:\/\/s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com\/originals\/ab\/83\/6a\/ab836a7e0d8f3a4cffa8ac8feba59abf.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Bret Easton Ellis realized the apex of his writing genius within his third book, American Psycho<\/a><\/em>, a truly bold attempt at a violent and shocking creation: a young American yuppie Patrick Bateman, whose solipsistic affliction cleverly exposes the putrid underbelly of consumerism. The narrative is limited to the first person, an intimate access to Patrick Bateman\u2019s warped perspective and Ellis skillfully employs this technique to ratchet up the tension in order to convey a successful black comedy.<\/p>\n At surface, the book is essentially a sizzling satirical deconstruction of the zeitgeist of the predominant eighties ideology: greed<\/strong>. The morbid fascination of trash television, the irony of call waiting, and analytic interpretation of the contemporary music phenomenon all paint the bleak world Patrick Bateman lives in.<\/p>\n The protagonist Patrick Bateman\u2019s narration is a constant vacillation between the obsessively detailed description of the mundane items of brand-name consumer society and the cynical and snobbish account of excruciatingly shallow and bland characters, which lack any semblance of humane depth or any distinguishing characteristics from one another.<\/p>\n The incessant identification of brand name attire is given a much richer description than the characters who wear them, so they are all essentially interchangeable. At least outside of Patrick Bateman\u2019s inner circle, people constantly mistake one another for someone else. Is that Luis Carruthers? Bateman said \u201cI think a lot of snowflakes are alike\u2026 and I think a lot of people are alike too\u2026\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n Their dialogues are either depressingly insipid and plain, or a complete rip off of excerpts from experts. During conversations with annoying characters, e.g. the fianc\u00e9e Evelyn, Bateman\u2019s narration drops verbs and pronouns altogether, and chooses to signify only the brand names.<\/p>\n Patrick Bateman is an \u201cemotional vampire\u201d who is incapable of transcending hedonistic values of his society. He lacks any impulse control whatsoever, any resistance to indulge his basest whims, and engages in escalating acts of abhorrent violence, which is always presented in explicit detail: \u201cThe ax hits him midsentence, straight in the face, its thick blade chopping sideways into his open mouth, shutting him up.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n There is no ethical principle expressed in the book, absent from the wholly existential, subjective motives that are promoted by the over-arching ideology of the wealthy class in the late eighties. However, the implicit principle of Bateman\u2019s actions is the precise source of satire \u2013 a scathing critique of the self-centered livelihood of yuppiedom.<\/p>\n According to Bateman, respect is a materialistic phenomena; the prestige of handling top accounts, owning the best business card, the ability to get in exclusive places. Yet respect remains something altogether elusive for Patrick Bateman.<\/p>\n As the designated poster boy of Reagan\u2019s ruling class, throughout the book Bateman inflicts various forms of violence against the victims of a bourgeois society – people of color, people of different social classes, minorities and women – and never had to pay for his actions, at least on the social level of justice.<\/p>\n However, there are several victims of Bateman\u2019s murderous rampage who fall outside of that spic and span<\/em> category \u2013 the ex-girlfriend who could get into the restaurant exclusively for the upper-crust, Dorsia and his arch-rival Paul Allen \u2013 so Bateman does not exactly discriminate in his killing binge. Thus, labels such as racist and misogynist do not apply here.<\/p>\n Most of the book is a disjointed, plotless, chaotic discourse about how \u201cthings fell apart and nobody paid much attention.\u201d<\/em> Once we move beyond the level of literary analysis into the vague realm of ontology and metaphysics, the book is understood as an aesthetical application of solipsistic boredom<\/strong>. It is solipsistic because the entire book is a soliloquy told from the first person by an unscrupulous psychopath.<\/p>\n Boredom pervades the book because nothing truly excites Bateman, nothing ever moves him passionately. His frank admissions of his homicidal behavior to his colleagues completely fail to register anything whatsoever with them. One character exclaimed, \u201cBateman killing Owen and the escort girl? Oh that\u2019s bloody marvelous!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In existential philosophy, boredom is a unique state of being. According to Sartre\u2019s novella, Nausea<\/a><\/em>, boredom is related with existence and being, not with autonomy or transcendence. Only in certain emotions does Being manifest itself to us starkly, and these emotions are boredom, or nausea. As the naked access to existence, boredom is the immediate realization that there is something rather than nothing.<\/p>\n Bateman is not in despair, nor is he joyful, but on the other end in a deep protracted struggle with the commonplace nature of daily life so much that he no longer cares whether anything is or not.<\/p>\n So, the experience of a phenomenon of being drenches the book, thanks to the existential vacuum that lies at the heart of the protagonist. For Soren Kierkegaard, Patrick Bateman leads an aesthetic life, a life of a devotion to immediate experience, like materialists or hedonists, and is doomed to boredom. Their repetitive life of disconnected \u2018nows\u2019 is the very source of apathy, and this is precisely the case with Bateman. The closing attempt at self-criticism, \u201cthis confession has meant absolutely nothing,\u201d <\/em>presented within the final pages of the book, truly a divine resonance of a denouement, shows how deeply central Bateman\u2019s boredom is.<\/p>\n Perhaps, if Albert Camus were alive today, he\u2019d call Patrick Bateman a post-modern Sisyphus, a character who began the novel as clueless and ambiguous as he ended it. The phrase \u201cABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,\u201d<\/em> an allusion to Dante\u2019s Divina Commedia<\/em>, is the first line of the book, graffiti on a wall. That prepares the reader for a mesmeric experience into a world where nothing is ever solved. Ellis closes the book with the words of a sign: \u201cTHIS IS NOT AN EXIT.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bret Easton Ellis realized the apex of his writing genius within his third book, American Psycho, a truly bold attempt at a violent and shocking creation: a young American yuppie Patrick Bateman, whose solipsistic affliction cleverly exposes the putrid underbelly of consumerism. The narrative is limited to the first person, an intimate access to Patrick … Continue reading Nor is this an exit<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[14],"tags":[167,68,166,338,76],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Af2X-12","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1483,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/1483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}