Reading through American Psycho I found that all of the characters had strange emotional ties to Patrick Bateman, such as his colleagues at work and the prostitutes he would pick up.
I found that his accomplices at work shared a lot of his more "professional" traits. I.e. they were very scrupulous about what they did and what they knew, while also acting in a very careless nature of not to work but to compete with one another. I found this to be very suspicious because the criminal investigator is nothing like Patrick Bateman, but is still quite professional. I think that the company alone is causing all of this unrest within these people and sort of mutating them from being people like the detective. This could be caused by excessive stress (like when we stop caring about school as we gradually get closer to the end of the year), business competition, or perhaps they are naturally spoiled individuals. I wonder if they act the same as Bateman at home, but only hide it more effectively than Bateman can do.
On to the women Bateman would pick up: they really showed a lot of diversity. Some of them would be very easy to succumb to alcohol before their character could be properly understood, so we'll just call those "liverwurst" for those with a worse liver. However there were some like Bateman's aid, who showed real intelligence, and could be recognized as "Clean". One common thing between the clean and the liverwurst is that they are generally afraid of Bateman in the terms of welfare. They all seem somewhat suspicious as to what he is doing, even while intoxicated, and sometimes ascertain a little common sense to feel repulsed at what Bateman requests of them. So the women in Bateman's life have a go-to suspicion about what he may be up to, but for some odd reason they all have some sort of attraction to him, possibly because he tries to be perfect in every way possible, and comes rather close.
The odd event at the end of the book where Bateman realizes that none of what he did actually happened really did a good job of explaining many more characters, such as Bateman's lawyer who acknowledges Bateman but does so in such a concerned manner that eventually he leaves the area because Bateman's period of post-insanity is becoming insanity in his reality. The men of society besides those who work at P&P are normal by today's standards, and are much more sensitive to the work that the employees at P&P does. They also show what I saw as a more professional stature, where they were the only ones drinking at the party to have a good time than to show prowess over another co-worker.
The Roles of Others Response
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting find of yours that describes Bateman’s colleagues, I never really thought about it before but every one of Patrick’s friends is just like him except without the psycho aspect. Then how every one specifically from his company is messed up even more and the idea that it could be the company who is causing all of these problems, even if it is indirectly, raises a bunch of questions. What would be the company’s motive for doing it to their employees? Does it increase productivity in most cases and only fails occasionally like with Bateman? Most importantly, in what possible way can a shoe store put enough pressure on its employees so that they become crazy and in at least one case psychotic? These are all important questions that come to mind when considering the implications of Bateman’s employers making both him and the other workers highly stressed to the point of being almost crazy to crazy. With the women that Bateman goes on dates with and such, I had been wondering why Bateman never seems to get caught for his crimes and also the girls seem to be drawn to him even though his personality is really strange. I don’t know if I would quite agree with you that the people he goes out with know that he is potentially dangerous or anything else like that or otherwise they would never be with him in the first place. I think only one person knew they were in danger of being killed and as Bateman told them that he was starting to lose control she left as quickly as possible. The very strangest thing is the part where Bateman finds out he didn’t actually commit any of the murders that he committed throughout the book, he just thought he did. It makes me wonder as to what degree and complexity a person has to be crazy in order to unconsciously think up a delusion like that. I can almost believe a person thinking they did something for a few hours and it not actually happening if they are crazy enough but Batemans delusion lasted for weeks if not months and was seriously messed up. What is your opinion on the matter, do you think that it was one like thing that was imagined or many small things that made batman think he was killing people?