Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

measures of success, where identity becomes the sum of product labels with which the
body is adorned. Secondly, it condemns the de facto violence of the dominant social
class for carrying out acts of violence—both directly and indirectly. On one occasion,
McDermott, one of Bateman’s friends, teases a homeless woman with a one-dollar bill
which he then ignites (210), or more obviously, when Bateman gouges out the eyes of
another vagrant (131). And most flagrantly, the novel deplores society’s objectification
of human existence, its twisted ethics of consumption as people indulge in a wide array of
voyeuristic goods which are linked to a perverse fascination with gore and pornography.
176
Apart from being a satire in both the classical and the medieval senses as defined
by Bakhtin, American Psycho also belongs to the tradition of postmodernism. The
heteroglossia of discourses that characterizes the novel—and in particular as will be
detailed below, the blurriness between the projections of the conscious and the
unconscious and the integration of so-called “pornography”—illustrate one of Frederic
Jameson’s features of postmodernism, which is “the effacement in it of some key
boundaries and separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between
high culture and so-called mass or popular culture” (Norton 1961). In addition, the focus
of its social satire corresponds to Jameson’s conceptualization of the postmodern as it
“expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism” (Norton
1935). By considering Jameson’s distinction between pastiche and parody 27 , it could be
argued that Ellis’ novel is more pastiche than parody, even though certain passages are so
ridiculously gruesome, the narrative could lead to some type of uneasy laughter, the same
27 “Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor” (Norton 1963).