HOW DOES BRET EASTON ELLIS’S

AMERICAN PSYCHO CREATE A

NARRATIVE DEVOID OF ALL
HUMANITY, AND TO WHAT END?

Session: May 2015

Name: Animan Amit

Candidate/Session number: (000040 007)

IB Subject of Essay: English A: Literature

Category: Category 1

Supervisor: A. Fielding

Word Count: 4000

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the question ‘How does Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho create
a narrative devoid of all humanity and to what end?’ American Psycho is a novel that is
based largely in the presentation of banality and hyper commercialization. Particular
aspects of the novel such as the shock horror of the murder-ridden passages, as well as its
blatant racism and sexism detract from its arguably ‘true’ message. Looking at what is
the overarching identity of the novel – a lack of any humanity – as well as what the novel
is originally intended to be about – a bleak representation of American life in the 1980s –
Ellis’s methods of achieving such a state of literature are analyzed.

In the formation of this essay, it was identified that a general endgame of a society
lacking all humanity was to be presented by Ellis, and thus various different elements of
the narrative were scrutinized to discern how this endgame was achieved. These elements
included differing styles of narration, how human qualities, specifically that of desire is
handled, as well as a surveillance of how an enveloping lack of any single ‘identity’ is
created. The role of the reader in this process is also visible, but could not be thoroughly
examined in this essay.

The essay finds that the idea of absolute commercialization is infused with all aspects of
life found in the society of the novel, and this is most explicitly conveyed to the reader
though the staggering use of the first-person narrator. Capitalist values are injected into
the narrative to illustrate a steady depersonalization of all humanity in the novel. This is
significant due to Ellis’s work at once being a hyper-realistic portrayal of American life
and the American Dream in this time period.

(291)

  2  
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………...………………………4

NON SELF……………………………………..............…………………………………4

INDIVIDUALITY AND APPEARANCES…...………………………………………….8

MATERIAL DESIRES………………………….........………………………………….10

SEXUAL DESIRES……………......……………………………………………………12

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..15

WORKS CITED……....…………………………………………………………………17

  3  
 INTRODUCTION

Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is one of the most barbaric and gruesome novels
written in the past two decades. It is concerned with “the eradication of difference,
subjectivity, free will, and discrimination under a regime of absolute
commercialization.”1 The novel is a satire on life in America in the late 1980s, and
functions as a satire by being the most extreme example of all the various elements of
capitalism it satirizes. However, creating banality for banality’s sake would not create a
novel as layered as this one. Ellis juggles an environment of extreme capitalism, and
mixes his own ‘art of providing excess’ with a certain purpose – the steady but prominent
depersonalization of all facets of humanity.

Although Ellis is a satirist, he can also be seen as a stylist, and here uses vacuity in
various different elements of the novel to obtain an image of a society as bleak as he sees
it himself. Distinguishable identities of characters are not present, the concept of the
narrator is thoroughly beaten down so as to be unrecognizable, and desires are thoroughly
inflated so as to become unimaginable. Ellis presents these elements in a manner to
illustrate the slow, purposeful erasure of all humanity. Thus, these different functions of
his writing are analyzed with the overarching identity of the novel to obtain an idea of the
purpose of this erasure.

NON-SELF

American Psycho is narrated in the first person, the use of which in literature generates a
kind of ‘self’ – a singular navigating vessel used by the author to travel in and interact

                                                                                                               
1
Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York:
Continuum, 2002 p19.

  4  
with a particular world or society, and then typically expose certain parts of it. Often
through this, the author is able to weave and express certain opinions and commentaries
on the subject matter of the novel and the society present in it.

However, the use of a first-person narrator in American Psycho achieves a very different
effect. Ellis wants to present to use a world that is ”lethally addicted to blandness” 2, and
this desire of his bleeds out in his characters and narration. All of the characters in the
novel: Bateman, Price, Evelyn, Courtney etc. are all created to be the same, by speaking
the same manner about the same mundane topics and paying them a ridiculous amount of
attention. Most of the conversation in the novel functions on an obscene level, filled with
inanities. This creates the first-person narrator, Patrick Bateman, to be very similar his
peers, with his voice and opinions rarely differing from those of other’s. So, Ellis has
created a narrative where his singular navigating vessel cannot and does not traverse and
interact with the world in an illuminating manner as it typically would. This mixing and
merging of the dialogue of the characters ends up creating a singular unified voice, a
‘non-self’, a narrative voice that is not very incisive into the society that Ellis sits the
novel in.

Instead of using the first person to have Bateman explore the adventurousness and the
intricacies of the society he inhabits, Ellis instead presents us with a narrator that is
deeply infected with tunnel vision. “I… want… to… fit… in…”3 Patrick says, when
questioned as to why he doesn’t just quit his job. But he doesn’t really need to fit in,
because everyone “looks like they’ve just strolled out of a Ralph Lauren ad, and though
Jean and I do too (and so does the rest of the goddamn restaurant)”4 As Ellis intended,
and Elizabeth Young points out, everyone is “…alienated from any ‘authenticity’ of
choice and desire. Patrick has been so fragmented and divided by his insane

                                                                                                               
2
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Books, 1991, blurb.
3
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p228.
4
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p250-251.

  5  
consumerism that he cannot exist as a person.”5 Thus, various facets of Patrick’s
personality facilitate the presence of the non-self.

The non-self is most visible to the readers during particular passages of dialogue,
especially when Bateman is hanging out with other yuppies. Each of their separate voices
and thoughts are all jumbled together thus making the reader unable to differentiate one
man’s thoughts and ideas from another’s. In the ‘Pastels’ chapter, the subject of
conversation changes from “What happened to Miss Kittridge”6 to “diseases”7 to
“…snapper pizza … red snapper pizza”8.

Due to the lack of any coherent conversation topic, and the general banality of the things
being discussed, the reader loses touch with the characters, including the narrator
Bateman. There is simply too much to take in, too many things to think about as so many
ideas are presented to the reader at such a riveting pace that it is impossible to take
meaningful consideration to what each character says, and most of the time the other
characters listening don’t do this either. Both the pace of the dialogue and the constant
switching of topics is what causes the readers to switch off and this is an important step
Ellis takes towards the alienation of the reader from the characters in the novel, which
will then aid their dehumanization in the reader’s eyes later.

Bateman doesn’t help his case as a narrator as amidst the dialogue instead of giving us his
thoughts or anything else particularly meaningful; he passes out additional inane details
such as the fact that “There are now eight Bellinis on the table.”9 This affects the reading
experience breaking up the pace garnered by the machine gun dialogue spat out by the
yuppies prior, however it adds to the reader’s confusion. While reading it is hard to
follow or understand where the narrative is going because everyone is just blurting out
monologues, and Ellis’s singular navigating vessel does nothing to amend this. It really
                                                                                                               
5
Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho a reader's guide. New York: Continuum,
2002 p37.
6
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p44.
7
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p44.
8
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p44.
9
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p44  

  6  
adds to the reader’s interpretation that Ellis has put no one there to represent the reader in
the novel. They are just watching it all happen, and gain no further insight through Ellis.

Apart from dialogue, readers are also asphyxiated by Bateman’s nature to describe
terrible inane details, and at many times details that are not important to the plot or any
aspect of the novel, as far as the reader can see. Ellis does this by having Bateman
describe inanities and relevant details side by side. He switches from describing a crime
to Tim Price as he says, “Foul play is suspected. … No bodies have been found. … Price
began his spiel today over lunch … and continued ranting over drinks at Harry’s…”10

Opinionated and non-opinionated dialogue is mixed together, as Patrick describes crime

in a very impersonal way but certainly describes Price with a certain level of irritation.
This gives readers an inclination to continually search for any sort of personality leaking
out of Bateman but Ellis doesn’t ever provide that and thus exhausts the readers,
particular in the chapters ‘Genesis’, ‘Whitney Houston’ and ‘Huey Lewis and the News’.

There is a paradox of description present in the novel. Although appearances are king in
this society, the characters themselves are rarely described, without any mention of
human features like eye colour or hair colour. This persists even though the novel is
supposedly a hyper-realistic view of Bateman’s day-to-day experiences. Personality traits
are also never described. Bateman, infused with his usual feelings of paranoia and
disgust, describes everything on the spot.

Thus, all of Ellis’s secondary characters seem to be sketches, rough drafts. A multitude of
characters, or rather just names, which would be a more apt description given their
relationship to the reader, are created only as tools, Ellis’s extras in the ‘film’ that
Bateman finds his reality circling in. Ellis has Bateman systematically disempower all
secondary characters as everyone else is described as “this dumpy chick”11 or “my

                                                                                                               
10
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p4-5.
11
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p65.  

  7  
secretary who is in love with me”12 and that lends nothing to their standing in the bigger
scheme of the novel. Thus, Patrick’s cynicism inspires cynicism in the readers
themselves, when they view these characters.

INDIVIDUALITY AND APPEARANCES

There is hardly any individuality or individual identity present in American Psycho, and
that never changes because everyone is only concerned with superficial details when
looking at others.

Ellis only creates Bateman to be distinguishable from his colleagues through the fact that
he is a murderer. Bateman’s own anonymity protects him from being identified and
punished, but he still likes to whip out the customary ‘Hi, I’m Pat Bateman’ at whoever
he meets. Patrick is slightly different from the other characters because he actually wants
to be known and recognized. Thus, he can be viewed as a victim of the society he resides
in.

Ellis gives Bateman a certain image of being someone normal, someone definitely not
more dangerous than everyone else. He is even considered boring, and “the boy next
door”13. Due to his understanding of his own lack of self Patrick is haunted by images of
emptiness across the novel, haunted by the fear that if he did “disappear onto that crack
(in the wall), … the odds are good that no one would notice (he) was gone. No… one…
would… care.”14

His supposed identity as a serial killer allows him a small form of escapism from these
hauntings. Ellis best tackles this notion in Bateman’s encounter with Bethany. Bethany is
someone from Bateman’s past, and thus not totally linked with his current social status.
She brings with her an unnerving solidarity as a character, someone who knows where

                                                                                                               
12
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p101.
13
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p11.
14
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p217.  

  8  
his or her life is going, someone getting ready to settle down, and someone who also
owns a Platinum American Express card. She is a slap in the face to Bateman as she is
such a violent reminder to him of how empty he really is. “I mean, does anyone really see
anyone? Does anyone really see anyone else? Did you even see me? See?”15 She has
Bateman question the very idea of knowing and understanding people, and here is where
readers can begin to ponder upon what is the point of the lack of all humanity present in
the novel.

Most other characters, particularly the women, do not care how they are known. Evelyn
is fine with being called Cecilia at her own Christmas party and one of Bateman’s
prostitutes “responds only when (he) call(s) her Christie”16. Here the lack of identity
present in his characters is almost being used as a function of humor, but also an allusion
to the notion of absolute commercialization, where everything is a product.

Interestingly, none of Ellis’ characters ever consider suicide in the novel. The closest
thing to a kind of suicide that can be found in the novel is Price’s sudden departure and
return. Ellis has him appear rejuvenated, refreshed, almost as if his metaphorical death is
the best thing that could happen to him. Bateman in comparison is “just … existing”17.
Thus Ellis creates the debate of what implications the death and violence in the novel
have, given that everything else has been dehumanized to a ridiculous extent. Price
comes close in the novel to understanding this, when he wonders “if your friends are
morons is it a felony, a misdemeanor, or an act of God if you blow their fucking heads
off… ?”18

These are certain roads that Ellis follows en route to the severe dehumanization of all his
characters. Creating characters that are lacking morals, a personality, and, filled with
ungrounded cynicism, his creations lead lives that are essentially meaningless, to the plot,
to the reader, and to Bateman. These secondary characters are therefore caricatures, and
                                                                                                               
15
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p229.
16
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p163.
17
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p369.
18
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p34.  

  9  
thus are not really considered to be real human beings, and thus that brings into question
the impact of the violence. Bateman’s murderous acts are disgusting, but only so because
of the style in which they are written. Otherwise, it is difficult to discern the consequence
of the removal of characters like Bethany and Paul Owen in the grand scheme of the
novel. On a deeper level, the disposability of identities presented by Ellis is so great that
it is implied that if Patrick murdered a completely different set of characters, it really
would make any difference. The disposability of identities puts into question the link
between these secondary characters and the narrative as a whole.

Ellis presents to us a literary creation which has been dehumanized to its very core, but
it’s dehumanization is so rampant that it is a piece of literature that numbs that traditional
ways that novels function, where characters are removed and killed off without any
consequence, without any impact on Bateman or any facet of the narrative. Mixing this
society with absolute commercialization creates this lack of humanity, and its affects are
toyed with and brought to question with the violence.

MATERIAL DESIRES

American Psycho describes a world where everything is provided in excess. All desires
and choices are made and facilitated by illusions of certain roles and lifestyles that
everyone must adhere to – the yuppie ideal.

In accordance with the excess, an important theme in the novel is the ‘disposability of
pleasures’. This is perhaps best highlighted in the chapter ‘Another Night’, where
different women and restaurants are brought up, tossed around and discarded at will, if
only for Bateman and his buddies to find something to do that night.

Commercial products give Bateman some sense of confidence, as “…with (his) platinum
American Express card (he) buy(s) six tubes of shaving cream,”19 Bateman feels proud of

                                                                                                               
19
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p172.

  10  
this statement, and it carries a certain sort of solidarity and certainty, with the precise
number of six, which is still obviously in excess, that could never really be achieved with,
say, a conversation with Evelyn or Courtney. At other points, his obsession over products
allows Ellis to further move away from the mold of a conventional narrator as he simply
begins to list random products in the middle of his narration.

In the ‘Shopping’ chapter, amidst his narration are paragraphs simply consisting of “…
porcelain cachepots and monogrammed bath sheets and foreign-currency-exchange
mini-calculators and…”20 Ellis does this to reiterate the idea of simply exhausting the
reader with too many details, and in this case it also further damages their image of
Bateman as a narrator. They see him narrating his day but also very robotically and
systematically listing out banalities, especially because most of the stuff listed sounds
like it is terribly useless. This pushes Bateman away from, in the reader’s eye, being a
real person with a real personality, thus adding to his dehumanization.

‘I want’ and ‘I need’ are so commonly stated that they mesh together over time into ‘I
am’. “Glass of J&B in my right hand I am thinking. Hand I am thinking. Charivari. Shirt
from Charivari. Fusilli I am thinking. Jami Gertz I am thinking. I would like to fuck Jami
Gertz I am thinking.”21 As a narrator, Bateman’s two abilities of describing his
surroundings and speaking his thoughts are fumbled together; much like his roles of
being a narrator and an agent of Ellis’s satire and some mascot of yuppie culture.

Patrick is unable to get everything he wants and this frustrates him. While this may lead
to the conclusion that Ellis commenting on the sheer ridiculousness of the insufferable
desires of yuppies, it also conveys that quantity does not mean quality. As mentioned
prior, Bateman accumulates a ton of seemingly useless and remotely assorted objects.
Patrick’s natural desires are so numerous and so unpredictable that they become
unimportant to him and meaningless to the reader, and the lists and monologues
concerning them can be glossed over.

                                                                                                               
20
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p171.
21
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p78.  

  11  
For Patrick himself, his numerous desires at times cause him to feel great unease as he is
“…suddenly (I’m) seized by a minor anxiety attack. There are too many fucking movies
to choose from.”22 as he is browsing. He continually feels a “nameless dread”23 and can
feel an “existential chasm”24 opening up inside him as he strolls through Bloomingdale’s.
These feelings are repeatedly found over the course of the novel, because all of the
products in Bateman’s life are a reminder of this chasm, the emptiness in his character.
When he is breaking up with Evelyn, and she continually asks him where he is going, he
can give no answer as he is “thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings,
ESOPs, LBOS, IPOS…”25 Ellis makes Bateman the character hide and cower behind
Bateman the ‘voice of extreme commercialization of society’, so as to show how his
desires have cause his personality to collapse from within.

Material desires enhance the degree of dehumanization of Ellis’s characters by way of

reification, whereby Patrick replaces his relationships with people for relationships with
things.

SEXUAL DESIRES

The idea of sexual desire is also a large part of American Psycho. Ellis pays a great deal
of attention to Bateman’s sexual relationships and fantasies. Here the language used in
the novel changes dramatically from the lists used previously. To start off with, the
sexual scenes are written much more descriptively. Patrick describes his sexual
experiences without emotion but not totally without purpose.

                                                                                                               
22
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p108.
23
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p110.
24
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p172.
25
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p329.  

  12  
One of the functions of Ellis so readily presenting to us Bateman’s sexual desires is to
show the waning of relations between men and women and all sexual feeling in this
society. Men and women are born to play very particular roles and relationships between
them exist purely so that both parties can provide the other with that they want. All
women really want is “a hardbody who can take them to Nell’s on a regular basis. Or
maybe a close personal acquaintance of Donald Trump,”26 Bateman and Evelyn are only
dating because “your friends are my friends”27 and “my friends are your friends”28. Thus,
the world of the novel is one where men and women live on distinct sides of reality, only
ever convening to provide for each other what has already been pre-determined.

Concepts of normal relationships like marriage and children are alien. Couples stay
together in order to keep a small sense of normality, even when Luis Carruthers is seen to
be dating Courtney when he is known to homosexual, thus creating irony. Families and
ideas about family in general are seen as crude, disgusting. Bateman’s relationship with
his brother is filled with animosity, his relationship with his parents non-existent, as the
sight of a mother breast-feeding “awakens something awful in (Him)”29. The idea is even
humored, as seen with Bateman’s visit to his psychiatrist, when asked “about her
preferred sexual act, (Bateman) (tells) him, completely serious, “Foreclosure” “30.

Due to Bateman’s deep cynicism, whenever any sort of deviation from these rules is
presented, it is treated with sarcasm, incredulity and sometimes suspected to be ill
represented to the readers. During his date with Evelyn, Bateman is surprised that “…
she’s serious, not joking. Evelyn really is paying (him) a compliment. She does admire
(his) sense of humour,”31 When Courtney tells him to have a nice Christmas before she is
to be married to Luis Carruthers, Ellis ends the conversation by having her mutter an

                                                                                                               
26
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p52.
27
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p327.
28
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p327.
29
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p285.
30
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p321.
31
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p118.  

  13  
anticlimactic “Nothing.”32 almost as if Bateman as a narrator is incapable of presenting
these moments to us truthfully.

It is plain to see that Bateman lives in a world governed by hyper-masculine, aggressive

rules. Women are a desired object (described crudely as “hardbody”33, “totally fuckable
babe”34 etc.) and an antithesis to what he must be for success.

Contrary to Bateman’s material desires, Ellis rarely fulfills his sexual desires and has him
satisfy himself by recreating pornographic scenes. Characters make love, but there is no
indication of love involved. This is perhaps why Bateman cannot find any real pleasure
from his sexual experiences, only an undead desire for more. Wanting sex, and wanting
more sex are not the same. It is not clear that Bateman wants purely sex or just the
knowledge that he has more sex than previously. Ellis’s tortuous image of excess imbued
in all his characters makes them unable to achieve any real sort of satisfaction from any
of their banal endeavors.

The dehumanization of sexual acts is blatantly present in the three ‘Girls’ chapters.
Rather than present passages, of passion and frenzy, Ellis presents hollow and
stereotyped sexual literature in these passages. “Sabrina is now face level at Christie’s
ass and cunt, both of which I finger lightly… With my other hand I keep massaging
Christie’s tight wet pussy…”35 Ellis leaves out any hint of emotion, and every sexual
affair is only concerned with logistics: ups, downs, lefts and rights. Sometimes the
narrative voice even succumbs to its own deep-rooted boredom, as Bateman is “tired of
balancing myself…”36 and as he “…bring(s) (himself) to an orgasm so weak as to be
almost inconsistent”37

                                                                                                               
32
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p348.
33
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p32.
34
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p251.
35
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p166.
36
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p167.
37
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p101.  

  14  
However, at times the streams of dialogue presented are very controlled and deliberate,
nothing like frenzied writing found when Bateman is out shopping or when he is with his
friends. “ “Scream, honey,” I urge, “keep screaming.” I lean down, even closer,
brushing her hair back. “No one cares. No one will help you …” She tries to cry out
again …”38 Here the inhumanity of Ellis’s writing is presented in a much more direct
way, because of what Bateman does to these girls.

But in addition, the reason why readers may be even more taken aback is because here is
an instance where Bateman’s actions are consequential, having some purpose for him. It
is surprising for the readers and perhaps the only instance where they can see Bateman’s
human character come out, showcasing the ability to will, to act, and to fail.

In these passages the pace of the writing is much more steady, even though the level or
type of vocabulary has not changed. Although Bateman still describes everything
monotonously, there are fewer commas, less clauses in the sentences, and for once the
narration flows. “She stares up at me wit this seventeen-year-old’s gaze, then looks down
at the length of her body… With the mildest of shrugs she places the glass on the tub’s
edge…”39 Ellis even allows Bateman to give off a slight sexual vibe in his narration
during these scenes, even if only to tear it up with sickening images and details at their
closure.

CONCLUSION

From the constructs of this essay it is clear to see that Ellis injects absolute
commercialization into his society and characters to provide an avenue for their slow and
steady descent into inhumanity. His attempt to most intimately express his vision of a
society as bleak as he thinks it should be is at its core facilitated by his choice to illustrate
the functions of the mundane in a first-person novel, the implications of which bleed into

                                                                                                               
38
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p236.
39
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p163.  

  15  
all other aspects of the text. Elements of banality, humor and at times sheer gore are
combined by Ellis to achieve his image, conveyed to us by Bateman, with a vehement
tunnel vision concerning only what Ellis would like.

Interestingly, “Bateman kills a great number of times… What happens when the monster
is not an ‘other’ but a leading member of society, the American Dream come true?”40
Ellis’s message has other underlying implications because nothing is resolved and
Bateman’s world seems unchanged. Ellis does not have him punished, and allows him to
grow worse. But not without with the growing sense that never will any of his
unspeakable acts of violence allow him any sort of escape from the inhumane, because as
we find at the end of the book, “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT”41. Whether certain parts of
Bateman’s experience are written to illustrate that even the extremities that commits
cannot break him out of Ellis’s ‘trap’ of a society, or rather to unearth the notion that the
rest of the characters are not as innocuous as they seem, is left unclear.

American Psycho may be Ellis’s own personal literary representation of how society in
this time functioned – he conveys the notion that it led to the severe depersonalization of
all people. No character in the novel goes though any lasting change or ever evolves into
anything positive. And this is because Ellis believes in a world in which everyone is an
American Psycho, because in that world “God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted.
Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…”42.

                                                                                                               
40
Baelo Allué, Sonia. "The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working Against Ethics in "The Silence
of the Lambs" (1988) and "American Psycho" (1991) p17.
41
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p384.
42
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho, p360.  

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JOURNALS

Baelo Allué, Sonia. "The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working Against Ethics in "The
Silence of the Lambs" (1988) and "American Psycho" (1991)." ATLANTIS 24, no. 2
(2002): 7-24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41055067 (accessed July 17, 2014).

Cojocaru, Daniel. "Confessions of an American Psycho: James Hogg’s and Bret Easton
Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to Violence." Contagion: Journal of
Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 15, no. 1 (2008): 185-200.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41925306 (accessed May 27, 2014).

Weinreich, Martin. "Into the Void": The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret Easton
Ellis's "American Psycho"."Amerikastudien/American Studies 49, no. 1 (2004): 65-78.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157912(accessed May 22, 2014).

Zaller, Robert. ""American Psycho", American Censorship, and the Dahmer Case."
Revue Francaise D'Etudes Americaines Cinéma Américain: Aux Marches du Paradis, no.
57 (1993): 317-325. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/20872388 (accessed July 17, 2014).

BOOKS

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho a reader's guide. New York:
Continuum, 2002.

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ARTICLES

Cohen, Roger. "Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of 'American Psycho'." The New York
Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/06/books/bret-easton-ellis-answers-critics-of-
american-psycho.html (accessed September 1, 2014).

"The Paris Review." Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6127/the-

art-of-fiction-no-216-bret-easton-ellis (accessed September 1, 2014).

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