Chapter 1 The Facade of Patrick Bateman

Patrick Bateman presents himself to the world as the embodiment of 1980s Wall Street success. Impeccably dressed in designer suits, obsessed with appearances and status symbols, he works at the prestigious investment firm Pierce & Pierce, though what he actually does there remains vague. At twenty-seven, Patrick lives in an expensive Manhattan apartment adorned with carefully selected furniture and art pieces that demonstrate good taste rather than personal preference. Every morning, he follows an elaborate skincare routine, works out rigorously to maintain his physique, and dresses in clothing whose brand names matter far more than their style.

In the company of his colleagues—Timothy Price, Craig McDermott, David Van Patten, and others—Patrick frequents exclusive restaurants where reservations are nearly impossible to secure. During these dinners, conversations revolve around trivial matters: designer clothing, restaurant reviews, and gossip about acquaintances. Despite their supposed friendship, these men constantly undermine one another, mistaking each other's identities, and showing no genuine connection or emotional depth.

Patrick maintains a relationship with his fiancée Evelyn Williams, though he feels nothing for her beyond contempt. He carries on affairs with other women, including Courtney Rawlinson, the girlfriend of his colleague Luis Carruthers. Patrick's interactions with women are purely transactional, focusing on their appearance and social standing rather than their personalities. His secretary Jean, who harbors feelings for him, is perhaps the only person who sees something redeemable in Patrick, though she remains unaware of his true nature.

"I'm into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It's called mergers and acquisitions."

The void behind Patrick's carefully constructed persona becomes increasingly apparent through his narration. He describes his life with clinical precision, listing brand names and possessions as if reading from catalogs. When he makes dark jokes about violence and murder, his colleagues laugh them off or mishear him entirely. At a Christmas party, when Patrick mentions he works in "murders and executions" rather than "mergers and acquisitions," no one notices the difference.

As Patrick navigates his superficial world, early warning signs of his psychological instability emerge. He experiences random flashes of rage toward homeless people, taxi drivers, and service workers. He begins to hallucinate, seeing words like "FEAR" and "BONES" on the walls of fashionable restaurants. The pressure of maintaining his perfect exterior while feeling nothing inside creates fissures in his psyche that widen with each social interaction.

At the end of sophisticated dinner parties or cocaine-fueled nights at trendy nightclubs, Patrick returns to his empty apartment and stares at himself in the mirror, practicing expressions and phrases that might make him appear more human. Despite his wealth, status, and apparent success, Patrick Bateman is a hollow shell, desperately trying to blend in with a society that values appearance over substance. The facade is immaculate, but behind it lies something monstrous waiting to emerge.

Chapter 2 Surface and Emptiness in Manhattan

The emptiness of Patrick Bateman's existence extends beyond his personal life to encompass the entire Manhattan social scene of the late 1980s. Days blend into one another as Patrick and his colleagues engage in an endless cycle of restaurant reservations, business meetings with no clear purpose, and nightclubs where cocaine flows freely. They constantly pursue tables at the most exclusive restaurants—Dorsia, Pastels, Arcadia—where the food is secondary to being seen in the right place. In these establishments, Patrick meticulously catalogs everyone's clothing, from the Italian suits of his male companions to the designer dresses of women who catch his eye.

Patrick's world operates on rigid hierarchies determined by business cards, apartment addresses, and restaurant reservations. When a colleague presents a new business card with raised lettering on bone-colored paper, Patrick experiences a panic attack, unable to accept that someone else's card might be superior to his own. These status symbols dominate his consciousness, leaving no room for substantive thoughts or genuine feelings. He maintains lengthy monologues on the discographies of Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News—not out of passion for music, but because having the "correct" opinions on popular culture is another way to demonstrate his conformity.

"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."

Between his superficial social engagements, Patrick's inner monologue reveals a growing disconnection from reality. He describes himself as "simply not there," a collection of external features with no substance underneath. The distinction between Patrick and his peers blurs as they frequently mistake each other for different people—a recurring joke that underscores how interchangeable these Wall Street men truly are. When someone calls Patrick by another name, he rarely corrects them, suggesting that identities in this world are fluid and ultimately meaningless.

Patrick's relationship with his brother Sean, a nihilistic character who briefly appears in the narrative, offers no familial comfort. Their meeting at a restaurant is as empty as Patrick's other social interactions. Similarly, his visits to his mother in a mental health facility reveal nothing about his past or inner life. These encounters serve only to emphasize Patrick's isolation and his inability to form meaningful connections with anyone.

As Patrick moves through Manhattan's glittering surface world, his contempt for those beneath him on the social ladder grows more pronounced. He sneers at the homeless, the overweight, and anyone who fails to meet his exacting standards of appearance and wealth. A chance encounter with a musician named U2 (whom Patrick mistakes for Bono) in a nightclub bathroom leads to a conversation about social responsibility that Patrick dismisses entirely. The concept of caring about others is as alien to him as genuine emotion.

By day, Patrick attends meetings where nothing is accomplished and lunches where food is barely consumed. By night, he returns to his apartment to watch pornographic videos, exercise obsessively, and plan his increasingly violent fantasies. The emptiness of his existence becomes a vacuum that Patrick increasingly fills with thoughts of violence and degradation. As the chapter closes, the line between Patrick's superficial world and his violent urges begins to blur, setting the stage for his descent into overt brutality.

Chapter 3 The Descent into Violence

Patrick Bateman's carefully maintained facade begins to crack as his violent impulses escalate from fantasy to reality. What begins with cruelty toward a homeless man named Al, whom Patrick taunts with money before attacking, soon develops into a series of increasingly disturbing murders. The first significant killing occurs when Patrick lures a colleague, Paul Owen, to dinner under the pretense of discussing business. After dinner at a trendy restaurant, Patrick brings Owen back to his apartment, puts on a raincoat to protect his clothes, and brutally murders him with an axe while Huey Lewis and the News plays in the background.

The killing of Paul Owen marks a turning point in Patrick's narrative. Instead of disposing of the body, Patrick assumes Owen's identity, answering his phone and telling callers that Owen has left for London. He keeps the apartment as a place to bring victims and store bodies. Patrick's ability to impersonate Owen without anyone noticing reinforces the novel's theme that in this superficial world, identities are interchangeable and no one truly sees beyond the surface.

"I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?"

As Patrick's violence escalates, so does his pleasure in it. He begins to target women, particularly prostitutes whom he hires in pairs, subjecting them to horrific torture before killing them. He describes these scenes with the same meticulous attention to detail that he applies to clothing and restaurants. The clinical language Patrick uses to narrate acts of extreme violence creates a disturbing juxtaposition, suggesting that to him, mutilation is no different from selecting the right tie or securing a reservation at Dorsia.

Between acts of violence, Patrick continues his daily routine of business meetings, dinners, and nightclubs. The contrast between his public persona and private actions grows starker. During a business lunch, Patrick imagines stabbing a waiter with a steak knife. While having sex with Courtney, he fantasizes about murdering her. These intrusive violent thoughts increasingly bleed into his everyday interactions, making it harder for him to maintain his mask of normalcy.

Patrick's encounter with Luis Carruthers in a men's room illustrates his growing recklessness. When Patrick attempts to strangle Luis, Luis misinterprets the attack as a sexual advance, revealing his own homosexual attraction to Patrick. This unexpected response so confuses Patrick that he abandons the murder attempt. The scene highlights both Patrick's impulsivity and the profound disconnection between his intentions and how others perceive him.

As his killing continues, Patrick grows bolder and less cautious. He murders a delivery boy outside his apartment building, kills a saxophonist in a park, and stabs a child at the zoo—public acts that seem certain to lead to his capture. Yet remarkably, no consequences follow. This apparent immunity furthers Patrick's sense of detachment from reality and conventional morality. In his world of privilege and wealth, he seems untouchable, a god-like figure free to indulge his darkest impulses without fear of punishment.

By the chapter's end, the boundary between Patrick's violent actions and his violent fantasies begins to blur. The reader is left increasingly uncertain whether the murders are actually happening or are elaborate products of Patrick's disturbed mind. This ambiguity is central to the novel's exploration of reality versus illusion in Patrick's narrative, setting the stage for the deeper confusion to come.

Chapter 4 Confusion Between Reality and Fantasy

As Patrick Bateman's narrative progresses, the distinction between what is actually happening and what exists only in his mind becomes increasingly difficult to discern. After the murder of Paul Owen, Patrick begins to worry about discovery. His anxiety intensifies when he learns that Owen's disappearance has prompted an investigation by a private detective named Donald Kimball. When Kimball interviews Patrick, however, the detective seems uninterested in Patrick as a suspect, instead discussing Owen's personality and business dealings in a detached manner. The interview concludes with nothing to suggest that Patrick is under suspicion.

Patrick's grip on reality further deteriorates when he decides to revisit Paul Owen's apartment, where he has left several decomposing bodies. Upon arriving, he finds the apartment immaculately clean, renovated, and up for sale. A real estate agent there denies any knowledge of Paul Owen or the gruesome scenes Patrick believes took place there. When Patrick insists that horrible crimes occurred in the apartment, the agent becomes uncomfortable and asks him to leave, claiming never to have met him before despite Patrick's conviction that they've previously spoken.

"...there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory..."

This jarring experience triggers a series of similar incidents that call into question everything Patrick has narrated. A dry cleaner somehow removes impossible bloodstains from his clothes. A girl he believes he tortured appears unharmed in a bar. When he confesses his crimes to his lawyer Harold over the phone, leaving a detailed message about murders and mutilations, Harold later laughs it off as a joke in poor taste. Most significantly, when Patrick returns to a restaurant where he believes he killed a waiter, the man is alive and serving tables as if nothing happened.

As these inconsistencies multiply, Patrick's narration becomes less reliable. He describes an increasingly outlandish series of events: a park bench that tries to eat him, a talking ATM machine that instructs him to feed it a stray cat, and a chase sequence with police that escalates into a massive shootout where Patrick displays impossible marksmanship, shooting down a police helicopter from a moving vehicle. These absurd scenarios signal to the reader that Patrick's account has become untethered from any objective reality.

During this period of intensifying delusion, Patrick maintains his surface-level interactions with colleagues and acquaintances. At a Christmas party, he encounters Paul Owen's girlfriend, who mentions having received a postcard from Owen sent from London. When Patrick runs into his colleague Marcus Halberstam, Marcus claims to have had dinner with Paul Owen in London just a few days earlier. These encounters further destabilize Patrick's narrative, suggesting either that Owen is alive and Patrick imagined killing him, or that the social world Patrick inhabits is so superficial that no one can tell the difference between the living and the dead.

The chapter culminates in Patrick's most extreme murder spree, a rampage through Manhattan that he describes in vivid, horrific detail. He kills random pedestrians, engages in a gunfight with police, and crashes cars in explosive accidents, all while feeling "a rush of sucrose." Yet the next morning, there are no reports of his crimes on the news, no police at his door, and no consequences whatsoever. This final disconnect between Patrick's narrated actions and their apparent lack of impact on the world around him leaves both Patrick and the reader uncertain about what, if anything, has actually occurred.

By the chapter's end, the boundaries between Patrick's homicidal actions, his violent fantasies, and his everyday reality have collapsed entirely. His identity as either a functioning investment banker or a serial killer—or perhaps both simultaneously—remains unresolved, reflecting the novel's central theme of appearance versus reality in a society where surfaces are all that matter.

Chapter 5 The Unraveling of a Psychopath

As Patrick Bateman's mental state deteriorates further, his narrative becomes increasingly fragmented and self-contradictory. He begins to refer to himself in the third person, sometimes narrating scenes as if watching himself from outside his body. His descriptions shift between past and present tense without warning, and he interrupts his own storytelling with bizarre tangents and repetitive phrases. These narrative disruptions mirror Patrick's psychological disintegration as he loses the ability to distinguish between his violent fantasies and his actual experiences.

The unraveling of Patrick's psyche coincides with subtle changes in the Manhattan social world he inhabits. The stock market experiences fluctuations that create anxiety among his Wall Street colleagues. Rumors circulate about companies failing and fortunes being lost. These external pressures compound Patrick's internal chaos, though he remains more fixated on securing dinner reservations than on any potential financial crisis. When colleagues discuss economic concerns, Patrick redirects conversations to trivial matters like the mineral water being served or the pattern on someone's tie.

"This confession has meant nothing..."

Patrick's relationship with his secretary Jean takes on new dimensions as his control slips. Jean's innocent admiration for Patrick persists despite occasional glimpses of his disturbing behavior. When she discovers violent drawings in his day planner, Patrick dismisses them as jokes. During a dinner where Patrick considers making Jean his next victim, he instead experiences an unexpected moment of emotional vulnerability. For a brief instant, he contemplates revealing his true self to her, fantasizing about a confession that might offer redemption. Yet the moment passes, and Patrick recognizes that even complete honesty would likely change nothing in a world where appearances trump reality.

Patrick's chance encounters with people he believes he has killed continue to undermine his perception of reality. When dining with colleagues, he spots a woman he is certain he murdered, now sitting across the restaurant unharmed. Paul Owen's face appears in crowds only to disappear when Patrick approaches. These uncanny experiences lead Patrick to question whether his memories of violence are actual events or elaborate psychological projections. The uncertainty drives him to increasingly desperate acts, seeking confirmation of his identity through ever more extreme behavior.

A visit to Tom Cruise, who allegedly lives in Patrick's building, serves as a surreal interlude that further blurs the line between celebrity culture and Patrick's reality. The encounter is brief and disjointed, with Cruise appearing unnaturally cheerful and disconnected from normal human interaction—a mirror of Patrick's own carefully constructed persona. After this strange meeting, Patrick wanders his apartment building's hallways, unsure which unit is actually his, a physical manifestation of his increasingly tenuous grip on his own identity.

In what may be his final act of violence—or his most elaborate fantasy—Patrick returns to Paul Owen's apartment and discovers chains of rotting bodies he doesn't remember creating. The scene is so grotesque that it triggers a profound dissociative episode. Patrick flees into the night, rampaging through Manhattan in a sequence that reads more like a fever dream than an actual series of events. He confesses his crimes to everyone he encounters, screaming his confessions into payphones and the faces of strangers, yet no one seems to hear or care.

By morning, Patrick sits in his office, staring at his reflection in his computer screen. He can no longer recognize the face looking back at him. His designer suit feels like a costume, his office like a set in a play where he has forgotten his lines. As the chapter closes, Patrick Bateman has become a ghost in his own life, present in body but increasingly absent in mind—a fitting embodiment of the soulless culture the novel has been dissecting.

Chapter 6 No Exit from the Nightmare

In the final phase of Patrick Bateman's narrative, he discovers there is no resolution to be found, no escape from the nightmare he inhabits—whether that nightmare is of his own making or a reflection of the society around him. The novel's conclusion offers neither redemption nor punishment, only the continuing horror of existence in a world devoid of meaning or consequence. Patrick's attempts to bring closure to his story through confession fail repeatedly. His admissions of guilt—to his lawyer, to friends at parties, even to strangers—are either misheard, dismissed as jokes, or attributed to someone else entirely.

Patrick's most significant attempt at confession comes when he reaches out to his lawyer Harold and leaves a lengthy, detailed message admitting to thirty or forty murders, describing the mutilations and tortures in explicit detail. When he later encounters Harold at a bar, the lawyer laughs off the confession as a brilliant prank, even insisting that Patrick couldn't be the murderer because he had dinner with Paul Owen—the colleague Patrick believes he killed—in London just days earlier. When Patrick insists on his guilt, Harold dismisses him again, saying, "Bateman is such a dork, such a boring, spineless lightweight." The exchange leaves Patrick stunned by the realization that his actions, no matter how extreme, cannot pierce the veneer of superficiality that defines his social world.

"This is not an exit."

The final chapters find Patrick increasingly adrift in time, unable to distinguish between past and present experiences. He returns to familiar restaurants and nightclubs, encountering the same people having the same conversations they had years earlier. He attends the opening of a new club called Nekropolis, designed to look like a morgue, where patrons recline on slabs like corpses while drinking cocktails—a fitting metaphor for the death-in-life Patrick and his peers experience. At the club, Patrick watches a video of his own earlier crimes playing on wall monitors, but no one else seems to notice or care about the atrocities being displayed publicly.

In a moment of desperate clarity, Patrick has a final dinner with his fiancée Evelyn, intending to end their relationship. As he attempts to break up with her, Evelyn talks over him about wedding plans, completely ignoring his words. When he finally manages to tell her explicitly that he needs to end their engagement, she responds by asking about their dinner reservations, utterly unaffected by what should be an emotional moment. The interaction reinforces Patrick's growing suspicion that nothing he says or does has any real impact on the world around him.

The novel concludes with Patrick in a bar with his colleagues, watching the television coverage of the Clifford Huxtable trial, a fictionalized news event that blends seamlessly with the real world references that have populated the narrative. As his friends discuss politics, reservations, and investments, Patrick stares at a sign above the bar that reads "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT." The phrase resonates with his growing understanding that there is no escape from the emptiness of his existence, no way to break free from the cycle of materialism and superficiality that defines both his personal psychology and the culture that produced him.

In his final interior monologue, Patrick acknowledges that his confession has meant nothing, that punishment remains elusive, and that no catharsis is possible. He has gained no insight from his experiences, learned nothing from his crimes or his attempts to reveal them. There has been no growth or development of his character, only the endless repetition of the same patterns. Patrick Bateman ends as he began: a cipher, a collection of brand names and cultural references, a walking void in an expensive suit. There is no resolution to his story because, in a world where appearance is the only reality, there can be no authentic endings—only the persistent horror of continuing exactly as before.

American Psycho concludes not with Patrick's capture or suicide, not with an epiphany or breakdown, but with the chilling suggestion that Patrick Bateman's existence—whether as a serial killer or a hallucinating investment banker—will continue unchanged, a perpetual cycle of emptiness and pretense mirroring the vacuous culture of 1980s America that the novel so brutally satirizes. The nightmare has no exit because it is not a deviation from reality but reality itself—a society where human connection has been replaced by consumption, where identity is determined by possessions, and where even the most extreme acts of violence cannot penetrate the surface of things.