Document Type
Reconsideration
Abstract
[First paragraph]
No book since American Psycho has created as much of a scandal. And few books have been as misunderstood. In 1990, months before it was set to be released, certain violent passages were leaked to the press that, taken out of context, made the book seem like a depth-less celebration of sexual violence. Right after Simon & Schuster canceled the book, an employee of the publishing house said, "The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of shit. It's hard when something like this becomes an issue of censorship, because you want to rush to its defense, but you can't" [1]. This quote sums up why I like American Psycho so much: it has no redeeming qualities. Ellis doesn't provide socially redeeming qualities. There is nothing nice in the book. Nothing about any of the characters, nothing about anything -- there is no plot; characters are not developed. You could take the things that the people in the book say, and switch them around with other characters, and it wouldn't change anything, at least as far as character development goes. Patrick Bateman literally has no personality. He's totally blank. My favorite paragraph in the entire book:
...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire -- meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...(274-275)
Repository Citation
Jacobsen, Andrew M.. "On Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–8. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol4/iss1/8
Included in
American Literature Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons