Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

unconscious are of a sexual or violent nature, and the protagonist of American Psycho
enacts both, profusely. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether these murders actually
take place, or whether they are merely the verbal expression of the protagonist’s
unconscious, a possibility worth exploring, for critics such as David Price emphasize the
“cartoon-ish” quality or the grotesqueness of the violence depicted, which renders it
entirely or partly invraisemblable and thus perhaps merely a product of the unconscious.
This leaves the reader in a situation where he or she needs either to consider Bateman as
a character for whom the borders between the conscious and the unconscious are
completely blurred—who has lost the social filter of culture with regard to nature—or as
a persona who allows his unconscious freely to project his most intimate repressed
desires without ever actually carrying them out, as we see in the narrator’s description of
a conversation with his buddies at “Harry’s”:
Questions are routinely thrown my way … I am, of course thinking
about other things, asking myself my own questions: Am I a fitness
junkie? Man vs. Conformity? Can I get a date with Cindy
Crawford? Does being a Libra signify anything and if so, can you
prove it? Today I was obsessed with the idea of faxing Sarah’s
blood I drained from her vagina over to her office in the mergers
division at Chase Manhattan, and I didn’t work out this morning
because I’d made a necklace from the bones of some girl’s
vertebrae and wanted to stay home and wear it around my neck
while I masturbated in the white marble tub in my bathroom,
grunting and moaning like some animal. Then I watched a movie
about five lesbians and ten vibrators. Favorite group: Talking
Heads. Drink: J&B or Absolut on the rocks. TV show: Late Night
with David Letterman. Soda: Diet Pepsi. Water: Evian. Sport:
Baseball. (395)
Bateman remains the voice of the collective unconscious—a voice that is uncontainable
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and refuses to remain muffled—and as a result it is either laid bare and becomes