I stretch her arms out, placing her hands flat on thick wooden boards, palms up, and nail three fingers on each hand, at random, to the wood by their tips. (E)ffortlessly, I’m leaping in front of her, blocking her escape, knocking her unconscious with four blows to the head from the nail gun. These are the points I want to debate regarding this fourfold serial killer.‘Perhaps on instinct, perhaps from memory, she makes a futile dash for the front door, crying out. However, this autodiegetic narrator, together with his inconsistent narrative, cannot be entirely trusted. As a matter of fact, Bateman may be regarded as having a predatory identity, as defined by Arjun Appadurai (2006).
Most of Bateman’s victims are socially-marginalized characters, members of minority groups, such as homeless people, homosexuals, immigrants, and prostitutes. Christopher Lasch (1991) asseverates that the old legendary Narcissus gave birth to a new one, paradoxical, dependent and less confident. Zygmunt Bauman (2009) posits that an extremely capitalist society forces people to be commodified. Finally, we readers cannot rely on his narrative once we notice ambiguities and divergences. Nevertheless, Bateman is a serial killer, and his detailed descriptions of tortures and murders are horrifying. As a self-absorbed, narcissistic protagonist, he becomes a competitor struggling to get approval from his peers. As he lives off the excesses of a consumer society, he is incapable of distinguishing people from products. professionals), Bateman is materialistic and hedonistic. As a yuppie (a popular term from the 1980s used to define young urban U.S. The four sides he presents throughout the novel are singular, though: (1) he consumes humans and commodities equally (2) he competes for recognition and admiration (3) his acts are horrific and (4) his narration is unreliable. This antagonistic behavior, nonetheless, does not make him a singular character. The autodiegetic protagonist Patrick Bateman, in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), is a troubling character, for he is highly-educated, wealthy and handsome as well as a torturer, a killer and a cannibal.
0 kommentar(er)
