Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

epresentative of thought vs. instinct, culture vs. nature, and humanity vs. animality. On
one occasion, while having dinner with some acquaintances, he thinks about how he
would have brutally murdered two of them if they had insisted on his ordering a specific
entrée:
Scott and Anne insisted that we all order some kind of blackened
medium-rare redfish … if they nevertheless insisted on my
ordering it, the odds were pretty good that after dinner tonight I
would have broken into Scott and Anne’s studio at around two this
morning—after Late Night with David Letterman—and with an ax
chopped them to pieces, first making Anne watch Scott bleed to
death from gaping Chest wounds … (95)
The novel’s satire is also intrusive, for its perspective is that there is no “culture” or
“humanity” which would set boundaries or define Bateman’s actions as evil; what he
does is so free of censure that it is not seen, not heard, and in a sense, does not happen at
all. A careful reading of the novel would highlight how the absence of a superego, the
total lack of “consciousness”—affectivity and introspection—and the unreliability of the
narrator put in doubt Bateman’s actual commission of all these gruesome acts of
senseless violence. In the text, the reader (along with the narrator) is forced to consider
this possibility when Carnes, Bateman’s lawyer, tells Bateman that he could not possibly
have murdered Paul Owen because Carnes just recently had dinner with him (388),
though this too is compromised because the reader does not know whether Carnes in fact
had dinner with Bateman thinking he was Owen!
* * *
178
In discussing the satire of Ellis’ novel it is interesting to consider Mary Harron’s
film adaptation of American Psycho, in which the violent excesses of the text were
drastically reduced in order to highlight its social critique. In contrast to the scandalous