Abstract
The epigraph above from Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991) illuminates depths of self-loathing and alienation that are often painful to read. The intelligent and affluent Patrick Bateman is a murderous anti-hero whose emotional life is bleached out and affectless. Indeed, Lars Svendsen (2005) suggests the mood of boredom serves almost as a secondary character in the story as Bateman tediously obsesses about his designer suits, the reflection of his chiselled abs and chest in the mirror, or the correct brand of bottled water to order in the restaurant. The only things that pull him out of his own indifference are random explosions of sexual violence that allow him to feel something, anything but indifference. But these savage breaches, as they become increasingly extreme, soon lose their affective power, and he is invariably thrown back into the dark well of boredom. Like the unnamed narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1999), Patrick is a radical incarnation of the nihilism, emotional emptiness and rage of post-industrial society and the shallow excesses of Reagan-era consumerism. There is, however, a deeper commentary on human relations, loneliness and the loss of vulnerability that emerges in the story. Patrick’s existence is so superficial and disconnected from others that he undergoes a kind of numbing depersonalisation. He loses his capacity for empathy to such an extent that he feels estranged from the flesh and blood particulars of his own body.