American Physco

Or maybe, just maybe, he deliberately left it for you, dear reader, to explore the idea.

Bateman being in a literal Christian hell is way less interesting than what's actually in the novel.

That is about 67% of the text, so I find it hard to believe he could have missed it.

cute

it makes the book actually halfway coherent instead of disjointed edgelord wank material. It also doesn't change the actual content of the book.

Not just any hell: Dante's Inferno.
In De Monarchia, Dante argues that man essentially pursues two ends: the happiness of earthly life and that of eternal life. A strong and noble earthly monarch facilitates the first end, and a holy shepherd the second. In Ellis’s world, the papa angelico is dead, and society is left to find their way towards nothing but earthly happiness, which is ultimately hollow. Patrick Bateman seems to have everything temporal anyone could reasonably want- youth, health, beauty, riches- but he is as despairing and vicious as an animal dying in a forgotten leg trap. The imbalance of power in our world has created a corresponding imbalance within each person of our time: the closer they live to power and wealth, the more profound their lack of spiritual individuality has become. The first words of Ellis’s novel are “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE,” scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of 11th and First in downtown Manhattan. Patrick Bateman, Wall Street banker, rich yuppie, and mass murderer, is sitting in the back of a cab with a co-worker named Timothy Price, who is as close to a Virgilian guide as Bateman will get during his sojourn in Hell (Bateman calls him, “the only interesting person I know”).

At first glance, Tim Price seems a particularly poor excuse for a Virgilian guide, but then, one must ask what sort of Virgil Patrick Bateman deserves. Price certainly loves to lecture Bateman and his circle about the shallowness of their clique, and seems to be the only person capable of inspiring lust in the otherwise Halcion-numbed Evelyn, Bateman’s supposed fiancée, who delights in flirting with Price in front of him. If Price is having an affair with Evelyn, he may be doing so to point out that she and Bateman are not really attracted to each other, and that their marriage would be a travesty. In any case, Bateman’s flawed Virgil soon abandons all affairs, and his friend, in a mysterious manner. One night Price gets Bateman into Tunnel (a real NYC nightclub from the late 80s), and in a lighthearted updating of Virgil granting Dante access past the various borders and sentries of the Inferno, provides drink tickets and two VIP basement passes, but he ultimately deserts him. Price becomes obsessed with the old train tracks running through the dance floor into an underground tunnel by the dance floor. After a little cocaine and vodka, he suddenly announces that he is “leaving.. getting out.. going away” to find what lies behind the blackness. He climbs the railing, champagne flute in hand, and with a hearty cry of “So long.. fuckers!” he runs into the darkness of page 62, not to reappear until 16 pages from the end of the novel.

Just started reading this book

That is what I am saying my friend

The explanation is that Price, at the lowest physical place visited in the story, recognizes that he is at the floor of Hell, the Ninth Circle, where the only exit is to climb the Devil’s body through the centre of the earth until he emerges by the Mount of Purgatory. In Dante, Virgil takes his charge with him, but Price goes alone. He understands something that Bateman’s would-be Beatrices do not: there is no possibility of redemption in this place. The others belong in Hell: something Bateman himself knows clearly. Indeed, when Price has vanished up the tunnel, the only concern voiced is Paul Owen’s worried question, “He doesn’t know about some secret VIP room, does he?”
When Price walks back into Bateman’s life and office two years later, he has been through Purgatory, as close to heaven as an unredeemed soul can be, but like Virgil in Purgatorio, has had to return to the Ante-Inferno. Bateman has no understanding of where Price has gone or how he has changed, but he does see the smudge on his forehead (and suspects nobody else could see it). The smudge is a reference to the seven Ps of the penitent that Dante has removed one by one as he ascends the purgatorial mount, and to the smudge marked on worshippers’ foreheads on Ash-Wednesday for the Lent season. It may be worth noting that American Psycho seems to take place over a two-year period, from April 1987 to April 1989, and that Price returns on Valentine’s Day (Feb 14th, 1989), only six days after Ash-Wednesday (which fell on Feb 8th in 1989). In his short time with Bateman, Price does express some disgust at the shallow inhumanity of the lives and relationships of the social elite he rubs shoulders with, but when he returns from (in his words) “making the rounds,” he displays a new level of disgust and disbelief at the evil of the world, especially while watching Reagan on TV in the last scene.

Perhaps that the absence of a coherent vision of the supernatural amongst his modern readership requires Ellis to situate both Hell and Purgatory in Bateman’s world. Amongst a people without faith, “hell” can only exist as the shared construct of warped ideologies that imprison individual psyches, poisoning simultaneously from within and without. By killing beggars, prostitutes, and poor racial minorities, Bateman destroys victims of the economic disparity that his kind perpetuates, but his self-indulgence amounts merely to a more direct and overt exploitation and consumption of these groups than that of his peers. Hell must exist on Earth, because Wall Street is made up of its nobility.

>if it doesn’t relate directly to muh canon it’s nonsense
Your headcanon adds no value.

The story begins as Bateman and Price symbolically cross the threshold into Hell, or the business district of New York. The red words, (the final of the nine lines graven over the gates to Hell in Inferno’s Canto III) are almost immediately obscured by a bus advertisement for Les Misérables, featuring the waif girl Cosette’s face. The face and the Dante allusion are juxtaposed in a reflection of Virgil and Dante’s discussion of Beatrice’s great love As Charles Williams states in The Figure of Beatrice, the passionate and directed love of Beatrice begins and sustains the Comedy: but here the ideal woman’s image is just a poster, using an engraving from an antique novel –there seems to be no living Beatrice for Bateman. This absent Beatrice can be seen as the root of Bateman’s horrific relationship with the opposite sex. Bateman ironically misidentifies Cosette as the privileged daughter Eponine during his several allusions to the musical throughout the text (including an incident where he kisses her face on a bus stop poster). The innocent Cosette is a Beatricean ideal, and Bateman’s attempts to fill her place with living women are awkward and disastrous. Bateman has no comprehension of empathy or affection for other humans. His so-called fiancée Evelyn seems to be having an affair with his mentor Timothy Price, in a parody of Beatrice’s descent to Hell to beg Virgil to intervene and educate Dante on her behalf, so his soul might be saved. Evelyn and Bateman have no real feelings for each other at all, not even basic lust (their fumblings in bed are a comedy of errors). His college sweetheart Bethany dies horribly at his hands as punishment for having surpassed him socially (she has her own Platinum American Express card, her fiancé Robert Hall, and old college rival of Bateman’s, is now chef and co-owner of D’orsia , the restaurant Bateman cannot get a reservation at).

Bethany does have Beatrician aspects: she is an ex-girlfriend from Bateman's past, and he used to beat her. Like Beatrice, she has passed out of Bateman’s Hell, but returns seemingly out of concern for him. The horrible racist scrawl of a poem Bateman hands her in the restaurant parodying a courtly love poem is a nice touch. Unlike Beatrice (who tells Virgil she does not fear to walk in Hell because she is a blessed soul of the Empyrean and so beyond any reach of evil), Bethany is still human and vulnerable, and because she is careless enough to go to Bateman’s apartment despite knowing something of his nature, ends up mutilated with a nail gun and tortured to death. Her mistake is perhaps in thinking Bateman can be saved, that he is worth redeeming. Bateman, it seems, truly belongs in Hell and understands that. His vision of humanity (377) sees that “no one is saved, nothing is redeemed…” If he believed otherwise, he would despair. Only through refusing to believe in purity, goodness, or a possibility of heaven can he shield himself from the knowledge that such things are forever beyond his reach. His attempts at confession, his efforts to be caught or at least recognized as dangerous and important, are all useless because he is simply confessing to other damned souls. When Bateman says, “this confession has meant nothing,” he is echoing the lines used by T.S. Eliot as Prufrock’s epigraph (Inferno xxvii). Dante meets Guido da Montefeltro, a former captain of the Ghibellines condemned to the 8th Circle for providing false counsel to Pope Boniface VIII:
"If I thought my answer were given/ to anyone who would ever return to the world, this flame would stand still without moving any further./ But since never from this abyss has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,/ without fear of infamy I answer you.”

Bateman’s proper place in Hell, by Dante’s geography, would be the Seventh Circle. This circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings: the Outer ring, houses the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, to a level commensurate with their sins.

I don't give a shit about canon
you don't know what you're talking about.

East Hampton, where Bateman and his fiancée go for a vacation, and stay in the absent Tim Price’s house, is Limbo: the peaceful home of the best of the damned. Bateman is unable to commit any actual crimes there, and finds the place unbearable despite the fact that his overwhelming bloodlust provoked the vacation in the first place:
Life remained a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera. I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation. I needed to go to the Hamptons. (279)

Evelyn has the keys to Price’s house “for some reason,” so they stay there. The house, four stories on the water with many gable roofs, reflects the castle that houses the noble pagans in the first circle of the Inferno, “an exalted castle, encircled seven times by towering walls, defended all around by a fair stream” (Canto IV 106-8). Here Bateman “really trie[s] to make things work” with Evelyn, participating in every newlywed Hallmark romantic activity possible, from breakfast in bed and fresh flowers to late-night skinny-dipping and gourmet meals with champagne. With no genuine emotion to sustain the activities, however, things soon decline and Bateman finds himself wandering the beach in the middle of the night eating handfuls of sand and microwaving jellyfish, while Evelyn reverts to a diet of only “dietetic chocolate truffles” and talking only about spas and cosmetic surgery.

Critics argue over whether Bateman actually kills anyone, or if all the violence is in his head. The so-called evidence for it being all a delusion is slight and unconvincing, whereas the likelihood that most of Bateman’s narrative, including the murders, occurs as he describes it, is overwhelming. It is tempting to see the persistence of this idea that Bateman is not a killer as a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the acts: particularly ironic because it reflects the head-in-the-sand attitude of the other characters in the novel, and because it makes no particular difference whether a fictional character is murdering people in his dreams or not. Nonetheless, there is a third possibility: that Bateman’s victims don’t stay dead, because they’re already in Hell. Their existence can’t be ended by Bateman because their suffering must be eternal. Paul Owen might very well be in Paris, even if Bateman did chop him up with an axe. Either way; the ambiguity serves to remind us of the constant frustration Bateman feels that his status as a hunter and killer is constantly undermined by lack of recognition or fear.

The book asserts itself as a commentary on a diseased society, in which the protagonist acts more as a device to expose the institutionalized problems. An amoral society will naturally breed amoral psychopaths, after all, and Bateman commits evil acts to prove that redemption and punishment do not exist, that he lives in a meaningless reality. The lack of response seems to confirm that even humanity (in the sense of generous qualities of behaviour) is a farce. Yet the desolation is in Bateman, and his perception of the world. His observation looking at an old photograph of his father applies equally to himself: “there is something the matter with his eyes.” (366) Like Milton’s Lucifer, Bateman himself is Hell. With his besotted secretary Jean he has brief sensations, glimpses that suggest a reality beyond his perceptions- but, as with price’s mysterious absence, the implications of beginning to believe in love or reason are terrifying to Bateman. Fear of uncertainty- of not being sure that there is anything better than his subjective existence- make him retreat to a grim solace in the stubborn conviction that all is meaningless.

In Dante’s Inferno, the greatest torment experienced by the damned, beyond all tortures devised for them by demons, is the awareness of what they have denied themselves, of the full uncross able distance between their position and God. Bateman frantically denies himself that awareness. Price’s journey towards redemption, even Luis Carruthers’ adoration, scare him, and though he is afraid to kill them, he rejects them as strongly as he can manage. It is no accident that the chapter containing Luis’ impassioned confession of love is called “Confronted by Faggot” and the one with Jean’s is called “Dinner with Secretary.” He will not use their names.

Bateman is a perfect tour-guide for Hell, demonstrating its shallow materialism, casual intolerance, utter self-interest, and supposed hopelessness. American Psycho is a tragedy, not a satire. It is the story of a man that refuses to contemplate the cost of fixing the diseased, unbalanced internal state, asserting instead that his psyche is an inevitable mirror of the world that has shaped him. Ultimately this is a self-serving lie, and the cracks that appear in his world constantly undermine his denial of a worthy external reality. The Dantean structure of the novel provides the mechanism by which these cracks appear: by referencing the primary tale of redemption and consequence in the Western tradition, Ellis betrays his protagonist. When Tim Price walks back into Bateman’s office after his long absence, Bateman is afraid for no reason he can name: because he knows that Price will have grown in some manner, accomplished something that Bateman is unable to do himself. Price has the ability to change; he has the desire; in the final scene at Harry’s, only Price is offended that a person in power lies, cheats, and steals. Only Price has stepped outside of Hell and now wears the mark of the penitent. His description of Reagan as a harmless-looking man never seems to finish, perhaps because it frightens him: Reagan can look like an old movie star, a harmless old man, but within him dwells the capacity for cruel and casual evil. Price now begins to recognize the same paradox in Bateman: he looks normal, but there is something terrible inside of him, something he has decided to stop fighting, and that is why he finishes that sentence in a way Price probably wouldn’t agree with: he claims that what’s inside doesn’t matter. Price’s gradual realization seems to be moving in the opposite direction, the growing conviction that the inside is the only thing that matters. Success has a greater dimension than economics, than wealth and power or being physically attractive; it is a moral and spiritual matter. Price’s return makes Bateman uneasy because it implies that his rationalization of the world they inhabit is no more than the shape of his despair. The sign that he reads, whose words are the last of this novel and the mirror to ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE does not say “no exit.” It simply states that there is no exit in the direction of Bateman’s gaze. “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT” does not state the absence of an exit: it implies an error in the seeking. Bateman, in his fear, has ruined any chance of finding grace. Unlike Price, or Dante, he insists his experience has “meant nothing” because he is terrified of acknowledging what it might really mean—that he is not the world’s victim, not its judge, but merely poisoned by his own despair. Blind, weak, and afraid to live, Bateman abandoned all hope long ago.

thank you for this, it seems a stretch and like you’ve omitted much to push the Dante analysis but this was refreshing for how bad Veeky Forums has become

No problem. It's a condensed version of a much longer argument, but I agree the evidence is largely circumstantial.

You have a link to a document with your full argument? I think it's genius and breathes new life into a book I already loved a bunch

I'm sick of Veeky Forums fags immediately shutting things down bc it's not their typical shitty post style. Seriously, thanks for something new

no homo vrother

American Psycho is interesting on its own without imagining that he's actually in Christian hell. What do I have to know to assert that?

Thanks. The final longer version is a published article now, so I can't share that, but here's the whole initial paper... or would be, if I could make the damn link post.
It's on app box com slash s slash
l4tor2muwr29cqdhtw8ntaz1g5bfvoq6
But if it won't post, I give up.

What's on the inside doesn't matter is him being frustrated that his fantasies are just him being a fucking nerd like everyone thinks he is

The book makes no sense if Bateman is imagining all his murders. That theory really doesn't hold up.

I'm talking about the movie I got bored of the book halfway through

...

I enjoyed your analysis. More so because I haven't read Dante's Inferno and it seemed very interesting.

Doesn't have to be a literal Christian hell at all. He's simply trapped suffering, and nothing he can do, not even murder, relives him of his torment.

>Bateman is in hell, discuss
Do you only suffer or feel trapped when you're in hell?

>suffer or feel trapped when you're in hell
That's probably the most basic definition I'd give hell. The OP doesn't define what hell is.

Make a post that's not hot garbage first off.
I said the idea brings the story together and makes it more cohesive.
NUH-UH is not a counter argument.

The story is cohesive on its own. Bateman is trapped in his own head, but there's next to nothing in the text suggesting that he's in hell. If you would like to provide textual evidence that Bateman is in hell and not just trapped in his own head, then feel free. If you are just asserting that pretending Bateman is in hell helped you understand American Psycho, then that seems like more of a personal problem than one with the text.

>If you are just asserting that pretending Bateman is in hell helped you understand American Psycho, then that seems like more of a personal problem than one with the text.
Really amazing how you managed to pull that out of your ass.
I'm also really impressed how you can say "he's trapped in his own head, not in hell" with a straight face. What do you think hell is? It's a vague metaphysical concept where we suffer. Bateman is suffering internally and externally, going through increasingly absurd ordeals to try and escape (being more and more obvious in what he's doing/straight up confessing) only to be constantly thwarted by the environment around him (people just not giving a shit about him/nobody understanding what he's saying)
If you can't draw parallels between that and a concept of hell, then you might actually be clinically retarded.

If none of my points and the post with quad sixes doesn't convince you, what will?

reading the fucking posts that he made in this thread you unthinking ant

Obviously six sixes will.

I read all the posts, and made half of them. I think, at the very least, it's a bit silly to claim that Bateman just happened to open his novel with the words Dante claims are written above the gate to Hell and yet doesn't intend to make any connection between Dante's Hell and Manhattan.
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Piece and Piece and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, "Be My Baby" on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”

>It's a vague metaphysical concept where we suffer
Okay so literally every unhappy fictional character is in hell. Thanks for the hot take.

I really like the part where you act like a fucking retard and then get bitchy at other people about it.

Just because you're writing more doesn't mean you've made a good case for yourself. You're using no commonly-accepted definition of hell to overextend the novel's epigraph.

i think i responded to the wrong person, i agree with the Dante theory its eloquent and supported by circumstantial evidence, id assumed there was an underlying principle to the story while watching the movie and wasn’t surprised to see that the book has this as its substratum

If you want to assert a ludicrous theory you need plausible textual evidence. Have you never analyzed a book before?

>Bateman is unable to commit any actual crimes there
didn't he kill a dog at price's house

Yes, that's as much as he can manage, and I mentioned it in an endnote in a later draft: Bateman does, however, drown the black Chow puppy he had bought Evelyn earlier in the visit. Evelyn, who names the puppy NutraSweet, “didn’t even notice its absence, not even when I threw it in the walk-in freezer, wrapped in one of her sweaters from Bergdorf Goodman.” (282).

Bateman analyzes his own reactions, noting that his “depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure.” Evelyn has quite probably gone through this entire romantic scenario before with Price in this same house, so her quick reversion to boredom may not just be due to her blasé sedated state. When Bateman finds himself standing over Evelyn in the hours before dawn, with an ice pick in his hand, waiting for her to open her eyes, he decides they have to return to the city, the lower rings of Hell, where he can safely indulge his desires among the other damned souls. Why Bateman doesn’t simply kill Evelyn at this point? It would be too easy. Evelyn simply doesn’t inspire enough emotion in Bateman to make the prospect of her death very interesting. Similarly, Bateman finally breaks up with Evelyn when watching her try to eat a urinal cake coated in chocolate which he has presented to her in a restaurant proves “an anticlimax, a futile excuse to put up with her for three hours.”

Nice how American psycho's interpretations now have a life of their own, and have lead to greater critical acclaim.
Ellis likely wrote it with Yuppie culture in mind, but now it's perceived as a clever allegory for hell and the human condition.

Keep your endings vague.

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”

Is it bad that I’ve always felt a strange connection to this quote? Like it encapsulates pretty much how I feel toward interacting with people.

Also the book’s about yuppies, I thought that was rather straight forward.

That’s depersonalization. I hope you’re taking steps to fix that, user. It’s a pretty solid warning sign that you’re very lonely.

Psychopaths are not ensouled like normal humans, if he really truly feels the motion of thought that Bateman is expressing here with its full connotation then its a sign of nascent psychopathy, he can't help himself. I've felt extreme depersonalization but in the context of the quote I could never relate to that internal state. On the surface it looks like depersonalization but he means he was never there, he means there's noting behind the eyes, that's not the same as feeling distant from your actions

>nascent psychopathy
That's not how psychopathy works. Psychopathy happens because you lack parts of your brain. I suppose intense drug abuse, brain trauma or just very long years of change might be able to cause psychopathy but most likely you're just born with it.

But user should look into getting counseling for depression and shit.

It was definitely written with yuppie culture in mind, but I think Bateman being in hell is a valid interpretation.

>That's not how psychopathy works
intensifies in early adulthood
>Psychopathy happens because you lack parts of your brain
I think this is reductionist and maybe even absurdly dogmatic, cannot be the whole explanation. The human soul is not present in them
>I suppose intense drug abuse, brain trauma or just very long years of change might be able to cause psychopathy but most likely you're just born with it
Its unlikely that one would ever become a psychopath if the roots of it were not already planted at birth, there we agree, however it can remain repressed or dormant until activated by environmental conditions (like being put in charge of a death camp or prison) or alternatively can begin blossoming with end of puberty much like schizophrenia, hence Serial Killers coming into their own in adulthood.
I've digested it, and this is the correct interpretation, in fact I'm going to insist upon this theory every single time the book is brought up and will credit user for it in due course

...

The book begins with "abandon all hope" and ends with a reference to no exit, a play about hell. At one point Bateman says "my life is a living hell" and is clearly suffering throughout the book, with the line "my pain is constant and sharp".
Again, it was written to criticize yuppie culture, but there's plenty of evidence in the book, intentional or not, showing that Bateman is in some kind of hell.

I've been paging through the book again, read a glimpse of a Thursday Afternoon. Read that chapter, it seems especially hellish.

IM AN AMERICAN BEAUTY

of course, he is completely entrenched by the spectacle
but so are we

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Bateman is a victim of modernity and technocapital

Thanks for the concern. I am trying to help myself, I don’t think that it’s me being lonely, in fact my social life is kinda flourishing at he moment, more so I had a lot of trauma and shit through my childhood.

I’ve wondered in the past if I’m a psychopath which I’ve read is an indication that I am not one. The concern of being a psycho doesn’t even get brought up in a psychopath’s mind.

Also claiming a psychopath doesn’t have a soul seems kind of reductionist.

I’ll definitely look further into the hell interpretation. I’ve always seen Ellis as a man who got lucky with American Psycho and who never was able to channel this luck or further his skill again. To be honest I thought American Psycho being anything more than what was looking too deep into it.

If Guy couldn't save us, could anyone?

The most interesting sincere reflection on a book I've ever read on this board. This is good.

Thanks. I've taught AP many times, in Horror class (though it's not exactly a horror novel) and in a course on banned/challenged American lit, so the final article used a lot of reader-response anecdotes from my students.

i think that bret easton ellis may have watched the movie vampire's kiss before writing this book because they are very similar. i also think that hirohiko araki may have read american psycho and/or seen vampire's kiss because kira yoshikaga is very similar.

interesting theory.

meaningful or righteous suffering is different than the suffering of a sick soul and i think that that is the difference

would somebody in hell be able to do something like this?

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I wish I could be a human like you and not a subhuman retard.

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There are some hints of it being hell, like an user said before “Abandon hope...” but I think it’s just a flavour topping in order to make you understand that this book is gonna be a hellish experience and all the theories I’ve read on American Psycho being in hell are very stretched.
It’s just a critic of the yupie society.