Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

one so fast that she stays alive long enough to watch me pull her
legs away from her body—her actual thighs, what’s left of her
mutilated vagina—and hold them up in front of me, spouting
blood, like trophies almost. Her eyes stay open for a minute,
desperate and unfocused, then close, then finally she dies … She
has only half a mouth left and I fuck it once, then twice, three times
in all. (329)
It can be seen within these particularly ghastly excerpts that Bateman’s capacity to reach
arousal is closely correlated with the acts of mutilation and torture he carries out on his
victims, and thus, in noticing that there is a gradual increase of these acts both in
incidence and intensity, the reader sees that violence becomes progressively the only way
in which Bateman is able to fulfill his sexual drive. This brings us to the conclusion that
first, the psychotic, schizophrenic, and sadistic traits of both the main protagonist and the
narrative are increasingly reinforced not only through the repetition of acts of viciousness
and murder, but through their increasing intensity as well. Second, violence in American
Psycho serves not only to illustrate the violence and savageness of capitalism—which is
also epitomized by Bateman’s being both a relentless and successful Wall Street
stockbroker and an equally successful and relentless murderer, but the misogynistic
aggression of the ‘male pornographic gaze’ as well. And third, the concept that sex and
violence are intertwined is also reinforced through the same processes of increasing
explicitness and repetition.
162
The discussion of The Monk in Chapter Three illustrated how accounts of sex and
violence can either alternate or overlap each other both structurally or textually as the
story unfolds. However, in the absence of plot, these elements—and in particular the
accounts of sexual violence—gradually become the focal point of American Psycho.
Paradoxically, while these accounts may be particularly appalling for the reader, they also