Violence and Perversity in 'American Psycho'

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, printed single-sided, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho has been a highly controversial book. The novel is a first person narrative describing episodes in the life of a wealthy young Mannhattanite and self- proclaimed serial killer. The author tries to reproduce the culture in the 1980s, which embodies the decade and all the cliches of the decade in the West- the manic consumer overdrive, exhaustion, wipe-out, terror, relentless aggression, violence and perversity. That is the main reason why many critics condemned this novel before it had been published so Ellis even had to search for a new publishing company. Even the publishers, Simon and Schuster, of his first two novels Less than zero and The Rules of Attraction decided to terminate his contract (Annesley 1998). The explicit and detailed description of violence in this book was the reason for the reaction of the critics in that way. It is not necessary to say that all these controversies made on one hand American Psycho Ellis's most successful book and on the other hand guaranteed him a place in the history of American literature. In this paper, I will study the Patrick Bateman's personality and the contrast between the public person Patrick Bateman and his alter ego. This aims to show the reasons and motives for his behavior and at the same time will help to create a picture of social phenomena in the USA of the 80s as they are described in the novel, in order to provide the settings, the atmosphere in which the violence takes place. This will help to give an opinion of this violence and perversity and to interpret them. In this chapter I want to give a short interpretation of American Psycho based on the previous insights and I am going to study how violence is presented in the text. At the end of my term paper I would like to give a brief info