‘American Psycho’ is a novel about investment banker turned serial killer Patrick Bateman. With quotes, Bret Easton Ellis dissects Patrick’s personality and shows his desires and emotions. The author takes off Patrick’s outward appearance and shows the mask of sanity he wears. As the story progresses, Bateman’s defenses get removed as his primordial nature gets revealed to the world. With Bret’s quotes, the primary protagonist describes how far he dove into madness and how that madness shattered his reality.

The Struggle of an Existence

I am a ghost to this man, I’m thinking. I am something unreal, something not quite tangible, yet still an obstacle of sorts.

The quote above got made by Patrick to show how much he devalued himself. Though he had an excellent physique, money, a steady job, and a beautiful girlfriend, he still felt like a fraud. Throughout the novel, he ridicules himself, stating he has no sense of existence or identity. His lack of definition would lead him to begin a rampageous killing spree.

Lunch is alternately a burden, a puzzle that needs to be solved, an obstacle, and then it floats effortlessly into the realm of relief and I’m able to give a skillful performance—my overriding intelligence tunes in and lets me know that it can sense how much she wants me, but I hold back, uncommitted.

In the quote above, Patrick turns a conversation into a problem. He makes a mountain out of a simple gesture and uses it to show how broken he is inside, explaining that he wears a mask around people to prevent them from knowing the real him. Patrick uses the mask as a shield to discern what others want. He also explains that he performs his act to assert control over others.

She embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualizing things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimeter image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of ‘I want you’ in Dolby sound.

Though he struggled with experiencing the world as himself, Jean, Patrick’s secretary, forced him to feel emotions. After their dinner, she hugged and kissed him. Though he never felt an emotional connection to anyone, he admitted that her actions forced him to expose his weak side, which yearned for care and love in a brutal world.

Misogyny

A good personality,” Reeves begins, “consists of a chick who has a little hardbody and who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things and who will essentially keep her dumb fucking mouth shut.

Throughout ‘American Psycho,’ the blatant display of misogyny is evident. From Patrick to his colleagues, the men in Wall Street New York view women as nothing but pleasure meat sacks that can get discarded after use. The quote above shows how deep the line of misogyny goes in the story and explains why it is so rampant. It shows that a society’s obsession with vain beauty creates a world where no one values positive morals leading to many outcomes, including misogyny.

The Rise of a Killer

My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.

Before he became a psychopathic serial killer, Patrick knew he was on the edge of slipping into darkness. He realized that the mask he used to prevent himself from falling into insanity began failing. With no alternative to cure his madness, he kept falling deeper and deeper until he could no longer control himself.

Identity

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

Though he was a living person, Patrick knew he had no identity. Throughout the story, he struggles to define himself but cannot because he traded the parts that made him human for perfection. His obsession robbed him of his humanity.

All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.

Looks were all Bateman had. He was perfect with toned abs, great hair, and clear skin, but he knew how shallow and empty he was. Patrick felt the burden of his pointless existence every time he glanced into the mirror to behold his exceptional physique; this made him despise himself more.

Laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there’s nothing there, not even a beat.

Even though he knew he had lost everything that makes a person human, Patrick never stopped searching for hope. He tried checking himself to see if a small part of happiness remained. However, there was none, only an empty perfectly-beautiful shell.

Pain

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

Even after committing many heinous crimes, Patrick realized there was no depth to his existence. He still felt pain and could not find himself. The quote above paints a desperate man who has sworn punishment on the world for the sins of his creation.

Insanity

I like to dissect girls. Did you know I’m utterly insane?

After failing to find himself, Patrick plunged into insanity. He went on a killing spree, ending many, including a child. His madness worsened as he started drinking his pee and eating the flesh of those he killed. However, it dawned on him how mentally degraded he was when he learned from his lawyer Harold Carnes that Paul Owen, the first man he killed, was not dead; this revelation made everything Patrick did speculative as his actions may have been all in his head.

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