American Psycho

At the start of American Psycho, Bateman is obsessed with order and cleanliness. The reader sees this with his obsessive personal hygiene and exercise regimes and his revulsion at the smell of certain colognes. It is also evident when he covers his apartment in newspapers to avoid staining the furniture when murdering Paul Owen. This changes by the novel’s end. His once meticulous apartment is covered in blood and gore. As he says, “the stench of decay smothers everything” (331). On top of this, “maggots already writhe across the human sausage” that he makes out of a woman’s remains (332). In every sense, order has broken down. The previously clear lines separating the edible and inedible, food and excrement, life, and death, have collapsed. In their place is a corrupted and absurd chaos. Bateman drinks his own urine and sleeps under, rather than on, his own bed. He makes a urinal cake into a “dessert.” Although intended as a way of tricking and demeaning Evelyn, he admits that “the displeasure it caused her was at my expense” (324). His attempt to undermine her sullies him more than anyone. He was the one who had to pick up and prepare the “cake” which “I, and countless others, had p****d on” (324). This symbolizes Bateman’s loss of control and the way in which his actions, his murders and violence, have started to rebound against him.

The breakdown of order goes even deeper. The boundaries organizing the external world have collapsed or blurred, as well as the boundaries distinguishing Bateman from it. The reader sees this when the police chase him. As he says, “I lose control entirely” (335). He has become dissociated from himself. His identification with his actions and his own narrative become confused. Something similar happens when he meets with Jean in the park. He tells her that “you shouldn’t fawn over him… I mean… me” (358). Once again, he refers to himself in the third person. He appears to have lost sense of who he is, of the distinction between himself and others. Even though Jean is declaring her love for him, he is unable to connect this emotion to himself. This is reflected in the same scene when, in an internal monologue, he says, “I simply am not there” (362).

This complicates the narrative’s authority. If Bateman is losing his sense of self, how can the reader be sure that his narrative is reliable? This ambiguity is emphasized toward the novel’s end, such as when a colleague tells Bateman that he met Paul Owen, the man Bateman supposedly murdered, 10 days earlier. Likewise, what Bateman imagined to be Owen’s flat, and where he supposedly took some of his victims, is being sold by an estate agent who has no idea who Owen is. This leads the reader to wonder if not only Owen’s murder, but any number of others occurred solely in Bateman’s imagination. Likewise with the police chase. Did Bateman really shoot a busker in broad daylight? And did he really have a firefight with the police, shooting and blowing up one of their cars? If he did, then the lack of repercussions and follow-up by the police seems inexplicable. So too is the fact that, as Bateman says, “there has been no word of bodies discovered in any of the city’s four newspapers… no hints of even a rumor floating around” (352). Equally mysterious is Bateman’s ability to kill dozens of victims without attracting attention or there being any hint of a body.

As Bateman says: “appearances can be deceiving” (361). The lines separating what is supposed to have happened from what Bateman fabricated or hallucinated is unclear. This is emphasised by the increasingly bizarre phenomenon he claims to have seen. For instance, when “a Cheerio sat in a very small chair” being interviewed for an hour on The Patty Winters Show (371). Bizarre messages appear to Bateman at the cash machine, telling him to “feed me a stray cat” (380).

The novel balances this by hinting at some real-world consequences of Bateman’s actions. For example, Bateman sees a blind homeless person who seems to recognize him and appears to be one of his earlier victims. A cab driver identifies Bateman as the man who killed “Solly,” a reference, presumably, to a cab driver he killed in the police chase (376). However, these allusions to an objective reality for the narrative are themselves fraught with ambiguity. It is not clear whether they, like the talking Cheerio or cash machine, might be part of some broader fantasy, whether their details have been fabricated or embellished by Bateman.