Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

constantly being mistaken 23 . Yet, as proposed above, these “boring” passages, which
clearly represent the majority of the text, work as “a carefully considered foil to the
violence,” (Murphet 24). While Manguel identifies these boring passages as a sign of
Ellis’ lack of “style” which confirms the book’s sub-literary status, he ignores the fact
that, quite to the contrary, Ellis has structured American Psycho meticulously, and that
the purposes of the novel are in part executed by his stylistic choices. As Marco Abel
argues, “[the novel] is marked by the extent boredom is deployed as a major stylistic
strategy” (143); a point to which Murphet concurs: “If Ellis wants to bore us, he must
have a reason (24).”
166
Murphet argues that the violent incidents are “so confronting and disturbing partly
because they have been so long in coming … and partly because what had remained
latent behind the surface banality is here given such swift and explicit expression that we
are simply unprepared for it (40).” He also contends that stylistically the scenes of sexual
violence situate themselves on a different level than the remainder of the text, which
accentuates their dialectic antagonism and their consequent effect on the reading process:
[t]he violence is not simply a matter of content; it is very much a
matter of form and style. Form, because we have to wait so long
for any signs of literary distinction (the text otherwise being an
object lesson on “bad” writing), that when they finally arrive we
feed on them hungrily, even though they occur in scenes of
abomination; and style, because it is here that the oppressive
paratactic narrative finally ‘lets rip’ and tips over from weightless
indistinction into driven, compulsive syntactical constructions. (45)
23 For instance, when Owen mistakes Bateman for Halberstam (215), or when Carnes, Bateman’s lawyer
thinks he is Davis, not Bateman, and that the person he claims having killed could not be Owen because
Carnes recently saw him in London (387-8).