Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

unaffected voice is that they relegate the responsibility for feelings and emotions to the
reader. In other words, the reader is able to feel what Bateman does not—namely,
feelings of disgust and repulsion for the acts of sexual violence, even while the style
suggests no such revulsion is necessary. It is the absence of affect in Bateman—what
Brocke calls “distancing”—that creates the intimacy between the reader and the
protagonist. Without a primary filter of characterization and personality, the reader
subconsciously becomes Bateman. Moreover, it is also Bateman’s lack of personality—
which is highlighted by the fact that he is constantly being mistaken for someone else—
that not only plunges the reader into filling this blank by becoming Bateman but also
makes him or her long for the violence as the only antidote to the boredom which plagues
the never-ending descriptive passages of the novel.
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Chapter Two explained in detail that both sex and violence are instinctual drives,
physical needs that form an integral part of human existence, and whose representations
have increased with growing intensity. In “civilized” society, individuals are forced to
deal with their sexual and aggressive desires either by suppressing them or funneling
them into some other physical outlet. Society has attempted—and succeeded in most
cases—either to transpose or replace these needs and to restrain the individual from
physical aggression. Yet these instincts resurface randomly and the individual
unconsciously feels a longing for them, or rather, for their ‘representations’: along with
everything else, we have attempted to either domesticate or sublimate our instincts. But
as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno aptly point out, “the culture industry does not
sublimate; it represses” (Norton 1230), and when these repressed wishes resurface, they
rematerialize in a more unsettling way, which sends us back to Bataille’s epigraph: