Summary
Patrick invites a girl whose name he does not know back to his apartment and knocks her unconscious while having sex. He forces her to watch a videotape of him cannibalizing a previous victim, and defiles her body with a rat before sawing her in half. At dinner with Evelyn at a Chinese restaurant named Luke, Patrick recalls dressing up as a mass murderer for a Halloween party at the Royalton, and amuses himself by watching Evelyn unwittingly eat a urinal cake disguised as a Godiva chocolate for dessert. Patrick callously breaks up with Evelyn at the table, who sobs and calls him "inhuman." Later, while dining on the nameless girl's entrails in his apartment, he begins to cry.
At Xclusive, Patrick takes pleasure from storing an Uzi in his locker, and recalls raping and murdering an NYU student the night before. At dinner with a large group including Craig and others at a restaurant named Bouley, Patrick wanders away and shoots a saxophonist in the face with a .357 Magnum while walking through Tribeca. When a nearby squad car sounds its siren, Patrick panics and flees down an alleyway and into a taxicab. Patrick kills the driver and crashes the cab into a Korean deli, before shooting a police officer and fleeing on foot toward Wall Street. Patrick mistakenly enters the old Pierce & Pierce building and kills the night watchman and janitor. After running across the street to his actual office, Patrick leaves a voicemail for a man named Harold Carnes confessing to all of his murders.
Patrick contemplates the creative development of the rock band Huey Lewis and the News, "the best American band of the 1980s," deeming their 1983 album Sports to be their masterpiece. Patrick spends the night with Courtney while Luis is in Atlanta, one week before the couple are due to marry. Later, Patrick and Craig sit at Harry's waiting to meet Harold Carnes, who never shows. The men leave and have dinner at a restaurant named Smith & Wollensky. Another night, Patrick takes Jeannette to a Broadway show and dinner at a restaurant named Progress.
Patrick visits his mother at a private facility called Sandstone. She asks what he wants for Christmas and tells him that he looks unhappy. One Tuesday, Patrick stops by Paul Owen's building. The doorman takes Patrick up to the apartment, which is being shown to a young couple by a real estate broker named Mrs. Wolfe. Patrick inquires about Paul, but Mrs. Wolfe asks him to leave. Patrick describes storing body parts in his gym locker, and later, at brunch with Jean on the Upper West Side at a restaurant called Nowheres, talks about a man he saw scrawling "Kill All Yuppies" above a urinal. When Jean confesses to Patrick that she loves him, Patrick tells her he is emotionally unavailable—"fabricated, an aberration"—but nonetheless feels moved by her optimistic spirit.
Four days before Christmas, Patrick drops Jeannette off at her apartment in a limousine after forcing her to undergo an abortion, then flies to Aspen. Later, describing his deteriorating mental state, he reports drinking his own urine and having Jean send Evelyn a box of flies with a cruel note attached. One day Tim suddenly reappears at Pierce & Pierce. Patrick wonders whether he is hallucinating a smudge on Tim's forehead, and contemplates the mysteriousness of Tim's life. Tim tells Patrick he is now the "right-hand man" of someone named Robinson. On the street, Patrick passes a homeless man he recognizes as having blinded.
At a new club named World's End, Patrick sits with Jean and a woman named Nina Goodrich before running into Harold Carnes. Patrick is relieved to hear Harold dismissed his voicemail as a joke, then realizes that Harold thinks he is someone else named Davis playing a joke on Patrick. When Patrick angrily insists that he not only left the voicemail but that he killed Paul Owen and countless others, Harold refuses to believe him. He hays he had dinner with Paul Owen in London ten days prior.
One morning, Patrick has breakfast at the Regency Hotel with two men named Peter Russell and Eddie Lambert. Afterward, in a cab headed downtown, the driver tells Patrick he recognizes his face from a wanted poster. He accuses Patrick of killing a man named Solly, who Patrick surmises must have been the cabdriver he killed during his "car chase scene." The man steals Patrick's Rolex and Ray-Bans at gunpoint and calls him a yuppie scumbag before before driving away.
Having drinks one evening with Tim, Craig, Preston, and a woman named Plum at Harry's, Patrick considers the worsening symptoms of his mental disintegration, such as ATMs that speak to him and park benches that follow him home. Watching Ronald Reagan speak at George H. W. Bush's inauguration on the television at Harry's, Tim expresses amazement at Reagan's ability to lie. When Tim asks Patrick for his opinion, Patrick merely shrugs. As the men continue to talk, Patrick catches sight of someone who looks like Marcus Halberstam, then a sign over the door at Harry's that reads: "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT."
Analysis
"Girl" is perhaps the grisliest chapter of the ultra-violent novel, one in which Patrick's transgressive fantasies reach a figurative, absurd apex. In a 2016 Rolling Stone interview, Ellis wrote that the rat passage was modeled after, "something I read in the Marquis de Sade, in his work. It involved a mouse, and I just upped it to whatever it would be in 1989." The Marquise de Sade's 1785 transgressive novel The 120 Days of Sodom, which heavily influenced the surrealists to whom Ellis was also responding, tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who kidnap, rape, and kill 36 young boys and girls in a chateau over a four-month period. Like American Psycho, the works of Sade, from whom the term "sadism" derives, at first prompted widespread censure and outrage for their violent amorality, though these works later received an unlikely defense from certain writers and philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir.
In her 1953 volume Must We Burn Sade?, de Beauvoir argues that what Sade strives to depict is not merely sadism, but rather the failures of sadism. A similar sense of failure and futility seems to hang over Patrick near the climax of the "Girl" chapter: "it's going to be a characteristically useless, senseless death, but then I'm used to the horror. It seems distilled, even now it fails to upset or bother me..." As Evelyn points out to him, Patrick does not "add up": he is, on the one hand, desensitized, finally unable to be moved even by the extreme content of his own sadistic fantasies, reinforced by the constant availability of visual stimuli that pornography and exploitation films like Body Double and Bloodhungry provide. On the other hand, he seems acutely sensitive and vulnerable, practically inconsolable near the end of the aptly titled "Tries to Cook and Eat a Girl" chapter: "my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself... crying out, sobbing 'I just want to be loved...'"
The final act of the novel showcases its postmodern emphasis on artifice and fantasy over authenticity. Some chapters—like "Taxi Driver" and "Chase, Manhattan," which Patrick calls his "car chase scene"—have self-conscious cinematic stylings, unfolding like Hollywood action-thrillers. Patrick even begins to refer to himself in the third person, a character in his own intricate fantasy. Like the characters Patricia and Bethany, the reality of the character "Jeanette" is left largely ambiguous. One possibility, which would comport with the novel's themes of doubling, splitting, and interchangeability, is that Jean and Jeanette are in fact the same woman, and have become splintered only in Patrick's mind. The novel's grotesque symbols consistently emphasize the false, misleading nature of appearances and surfaces, such as Evelyn's Godiva chocolate (actually a urinal cake), or Patrick's gym locker (actually a storage unit for guns and body parts).
In addition to Sade, another modern French writer whose influence over American Psycho looms large is Charles Baudelaire, whose collection of poems Flowers of Evil depicts modern life in the same intonations of despair and nihilism that Ellis's novel does. The collection's opening poem, "To the Reader," forewarns falling prey to ennui—a condition of dissatisfied boredom and listlessness. Patrick not only seems to embody Baudelaire's famous claim in "To the Reader" that the only thing keeping humanity from acts of "rape or arson, poison or the knife," is a lack of boldness, but also seems by the end to exemplify the sort of ennui that takes root in decadent, modern societies. When Tim asks Patrick in the final chapter what he thinks of Reagan, Patrick cannot even bring himself to offer a verbal response: "I sigh, shrug, whatever."
Ellis chooses to leave open-ended the question as to whether Patrick has committed all—or any—of the rapes and murders described in the novel, though Paul Owen's likely reemergence seems strongly to suggest that Patrick has at least invented some of them. Patrick's glib, apathetic attempt to answer an abstract question "Why?" in the final chapter's closing lines conveys not only Patrick's ennui but also the total moral and intellectual vacuity of Wall Street, and the rarefied culture it represents in microcosm. The last thing Patrick sees in the novel is a "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT" sign, which both parallels the opening line's reference to entryways, and suggests in a fatalistic and existential sense that an escape from the "Hell" of reality—for Patrick, for the reader, for everyday Americans who are impoverished or suffering—is not an option.
