Greed
Greed is a central theme of the novel, and the watchword of the acquisitive, predatory Wall Street culture in which the story takes place. The novel opens with Patrick's colleague Timothy Price touting his own professional credentials and complaining that he is underpaid, despite his considerable income. Patrick's obsessions constantly revolve around luxury commodities and status symbols that seem just out of reach—for instance, a table at Dorsia, the Fisher account, or a sophisticated business card. Greed and envy seem to motivate every aspect of Patrick's personality, from his career in investment banking, to his decadently appointed apartment, to his insatiable drives and appetites. Rather than leave him fulfilled, Patrick's avaricious nature often leaves him feeling vacant and listless.
Hyper-masculinity
American Psycho is set in the male-dominated sphere of investment banking on Wall Street in the late 1980s. In this competitive hierarchy, the novel's male characters jockey for status not only by constantly impugning each others' masculinity, but also by habitually disparaging women, gay men, people of color, and the homeless. At the same time, Ellis shows how the men ironically adhere to traditionally feminine grooming habits, like manicures, pedicures, and self-tanning, and seem more interested in each other than in their respective girlfriends. Patrick worships Donald Trump—a paragon of the affluent, hyper-masculine persona he longs to inhabit—and over the course of the novel also has fleeting encounters with 1980s hyper-masculine celebrities and rockstars like Tom Cruise, Bono, and Sylvester Stallone.
Misogyny
Patrick exhibits a pathological hatred of women, including his own girlfriend Evelyn, whom he delights in treating cruelly over the course of the novel. Patrick has cold, transactional relationships with all of the women he dates, treating them like interchangeable and replaceable units. The traits that Patrick seems to disdain in the women around him—venality, self-absorption, materialism—are traits that Patrick himself embodies, suggesting that Patrick's misogyny may stem from his own unresolved feelings of self-loathing and emasculation. Patrick seems to cope with his feelings of impotence and despair by vividly imagining dozens of brutal, sexually charged murders of primarily women, fantasies which are finally unable to rid him of his deeply rooted sense of inadequacy.
Homoeroticism
Set in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the characters in American Psycho are aggressively homophobic, largely as a way to compensate for the homoeroticism that pervades every aspect of the almost-exclusively male world of investment banking. In the novel's first chapter, Tim tells Patrick, "you should see how ripped my stomach is. The definition. Completely buffed out..." Patrick, who often ignores his female dates, constantly and fetishistically compares his body and perceived social status to that of other men, becoming humiliated when he does not measure up, as in the business-card scene. Patrick's homoerotic desire for Paul Owen verges on a homicidal longing to become him, and his inexplicable inability to harm or even imagine harming Luis raises the question as to whether Patrick's fear and loathing of him masks a more complex feeling or desire.
Fantasy
American Psycho alternates seamlessly between reality and fantasy, giving the reader few clues as to whether the events transpiring are imagined or not. The novel's firm rejection of reliable knowledge is one reason why it is considered to be a literary example of postmodernism. Patrick's "fantasies" often resemble self-torturing nightmares, such as his dates with Patricia and Bethany, both of which seem to reveal Patrick's insecurities with uncanny precision. Ellis has stated that the novel may be interpreted as a "collective" dream—an exploration not of one man's pathological mindset, but rather the regnant cultural ideology of the United States in the late 1980s. This possibility suggests that Patrick's virulent narcissism, misogyny, homophobia, and racism are merely symbolic expressions of a national ideological program.
Duality
Like its gothic forebears The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, American Psycho makes liberal use of the theme of doubles and duality. The theme of doubling conveys the deterioration of Patrick's mind, as well as the interchangeability of the novel's many characters. Patrick himself seems to harbor two personae: the "boy next door" and the "psychopath." Early in the novel, Patrick imagines taking a woman named Patricia on a date who, even beyond her name, is identical to him in nearly every way. Later, he imagines dating two women named Jean and Jeanette who may in fact be the same person. Many characters have two lovers—for instance, Patrick is secretly seeing Courtney, Evelyn is secretly seeing Tim, and Luis is secretly seeing Patrick. In keeping with the novel's postmodern style, the pervasive theme of doubles and doubling makes the identities of the novel's characters unstable and incoherent.
Mass Culture
Though many aspects of his personality are antisocial and nihilistic, Patrick is nevertheless an avid and enthusiastic consumer of popular cultural products like Top 40 music, Hollywood films, Broadway, and tabloid talk shows. Some of the most infamous chapters of the book—such as "Genesis," "Huey Lewis & the News," and "Whitney Houston"—pause the progression of the story so that Patrick can deliver the kind of considered, long-form analyses of popular music one might find in Spin or Rolling Stone. Patrick also habitually rents VHS cassette tapes, harboring a particular fondness for Brian DePalma's 1984 erotic thriller Body Double. The zeal with which Patrick appreciates and consumes popular culture subversively suggests that his sociopathic personality is not an aberration or deviation from American mainstream culture, but rather a symbolic product of it.
