American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis · 1991

Premise

Patrick Bateman, a young investment banker in late-1980s Manhattan, narrates his days of expensive restaurants, designer clothes and business-card rivalries, and his nights of torture and murder; the novel is a satire of a culture so absorbed in surfaces and status that a killer can confess openly without anyone noticing, and it leaves uncertain whether the murders happen at all.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending. The novel contains extreme sexual violence, which the guide refers to without describing.

The main ideas

In a culture of pure consumption, identity is reduced to brands, possessions and status markers.
People who define themselves by the same markers become interchangeable, to others and to themselves.
A society that sees only surfaces cannot see evil, even when it confesses.
Bateman's violence is the logical extreme of a world that treats people as objects to be used and discarded.
Emptiness does not produce peace. It produces rage and a hunger that nothing satisfies.
There is no exit, and no punishment, from a world that does not register what is happening in it.

Abandon all hope

The novel opens with graffiti scrawled in blood-red letters on a bank wall: "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE," the inscription over the gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno. The Hell that follows is Manhattan around 1989, among young men who work in mergers and acquisitions at a firm called Pierce & Pierce.

Bateman, the narrator, a Harvard graduate in his late twenties, describes his world with obsessive precision. Every person who enters a scene is catalogued by the labels of their suits, shoes and glasses. Meals are listed dish by dish. A long chapter records his morning routine of grooming products and exercise. The catalogues are tedious by design: they show a mind with no inner life, only inventories.

Ellis wrote the book as a satire of the Wall Street culture of the 1980s. Its publication became a scandal: Simon & Schuster, which had paid for it, cancelled it in November 1990 after violent excerpts leaked and its own staff objected, and Vintage published it in March 1991.

Implication: a life organized entirely around status and possessions leaves nothing underneath. Notice when you are describing yourself, or others, mainly by what they own.

Interchangeable men

In one of the novel's best-known scenes, Bateman and his colleagues compare their business cards. The cards are almost identical, distinguished only by shades of off-white and choice of typeface, yet Bateman is shaken when a colleague's is better than his.

The men of Pierce & Pierce are so alike, in suits, haircuts, glasses and jobs, that they constantly mistake one another. Paul Owen, a rival, keeps taking Bateman for another colleague, Marcus Halberstam; Bateman takes advantage of the mistake, posing as Halberstam to get Owen drunk at dinner before killing him. Throughout the novel, characters greet each other by the wrong names, and no one seems to mind.

The mechanism is that when people define themselves by the same external markers, nothing distinguishes them. Bateman's frantic attention to detail is an attempt to prove that he exists as an individual in a world where he does not.

Implication: identity built on the same markers as everyone else's offers no identity at all. What distinguishes a person is not visible on a business card.

Surfaces and depths

The novel juxtaposes Bateman's surface life with his crimes. Chapters describing murders are followed, sometimes immediately, by earnest critical essays in his voice on the careers of Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News, written in the style of a rock magazine. He discusses the albums with the same seriousness, and the same flatness, as he describes torturing a victim.

His relationships are equally hollow. He is engaged to a woman, Evelyn, whom he does not love, conducts affairs with women who bore him and despises nearly everyone he knows. His secretary, Jean, loves him, and he occasionally imagines a different life with her, but cannot reach it.

The mechanism is flattening. When consumer opinions, social ambitions and atrocities are all registered in the same voice, nothing has more weight than anything else, and moral distinction disappears.

Implication: notice when everything in your life is given the same weight. The ability to see that some things matter more than others is a moral capacity, and it can be lost.

Violence that nobody sees

Bateman's crimes escalate through the novel, from attacks on the homeless to the torture and murder of women he picks up and of acquaintances. He kills Paul Owen with an axe in Owen's apartment.

No one notices. A private detective, Donald Kimball, hired by Owen's girlfriend, questions Bateman politely and then tells him that people believe Owen may be in London. As Bateman's grip on reality loosens, the narration grows stranger: in one chapter, an automated teller machine displays the message "FEED ME A STRAY CAT," and a police chase follows that reads like a scene from an action film.

The mechanism is that a society concerned only with appearances has no attention left for what lies beneath them. Bateman's victims, especially the poor and the women he considers disposable, are invisible to the people around him, as they are to him.

Implication: a culture that judges people by surfaces will fail to see harm done to those it already regards as unimportant.

The confession

Near the end, Bateman leaves a long message on the answering machine of his lawyer, Harold Carnes, confessing to the murders in detail. When he later meets Carnes at a party, the lawyer mistakes him for someone else, treats the message as a hilarious joke and tells him that it cannot be true, because he had dinner with Paul Owen in London twice only days before.

Bateman insists. Carnes does not believe him and moves on.

The scene makes the novel's central question explicit. Either Bateman's murders are real and his world is so indifferent that a full confession is taken as a joke, or some or all of them are fantasies of a man so empty that he imagines atrocities to feel something. Ellis has said that he was always on the fence about whether they were real, and preferred to leave it unresolved.

Implication: in a world where no one listens and everyone mistakes everyone else, even the truth is not recognized when it is spoken.

This is not an exit

The novel ends at a bar with Bateman and his colleagues, talking about nothing. He looks up and sees a sign over a door: "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT."

There is no punishment, no revelation and no change. Bateman remains free and remains trapped. The ending echoes Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit, in which hell is an eternity spent with other people, and returns to the opening line: this is a Hell that cannot be left.

Implication: a life organized around emptiness offers no way out from inside it. Escape, if it comes, requires something the culture of surfaces does not supply.

Where it falls short

Its violence against women overwhelms its satire. The National Organization for Women's Los Angeles chapter called for a boycott on publication, arguing that the extended scenes of sexual torture were exploitation rather than commentary, and many readers find the violence so extreme that the social criticism is lost.
It never places its narrator in a moral world. Norman Mailer, in Vanity Fair in 1991, granted that the book took on Dostoevskian themes but argued that it failed because Bateman is never set against any standard by which his acts could be judged.
Its catalogues of brands and possessions, essential to the satire, are repetitive enough to exhaust many readers before they make their point.

Less Than Zero — Ellis's first novel, on the same emptiness among the wealthy young.
Crime and Punishment — a murderer destroyed by his conscience, set against one who has none.