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Another Night
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in American Psycho, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Materialism and Consumption
Identity and Isolation
Monotony and Desensitization
Vice and Violence
The Truth
Summary
Analysis
Bateman is in his apartment with a girl he’s picked up and whose name he doesn’t know. She’s asking him where he went to school and what he does for a living. She also asks him about the strange smell; he tells her it’s from a rat he killed. He finds some cocaine in his bathroom and snorts it. The scene then shifts to his bedroom, where the two are now having sex. He’s being incredibly rough with the girl, slapping and scratching her, and aggressively using the strap-on with her. She tells him to stop but he doesn’t, and eventually she pushes him off her, calling him a “crazy fucking bastard” and trying to escape, but Bateman leaps at her, maces her, and bashes her head into the wall several times.
In what has become his new usual fashion, Bateman brings a woman back to his putrid apartment to do drugs and have sex. While drugs, sex, and violence were once separate aspects of his life, they now mingle together to become a mess of one and the same. This is the first time the reader sees a woman fight back when Bateman is rough with her, but this challenge is met only with increased aggression and violence from Bateman.
Themes
When the girl regains consciousness, Bateman has tied her up and smeared brie cheese on her vagina. On the TV, he’s playing the videotape of the last girl he tortured. He proceeds to use a drill to gouge at the girl’s jaw and face. He tries to shove the end of the Habitrail cage’s tube into her vagina, but it doesn’t fit, so he uses some acid to make the opening wider. Inside the cage is the crazed rat from his toilet, which runs towards the smell of the cheese and begins gnawing at the woman’s vagina, eventually crawling inside her body. Bateman takes a chainsaw to the girl’s neck and body, cuts up her face, and gouges out her eyes. The rat emerges headfirst from her open neck. Later, Bateman takes parts of the girl’s body and puts them in the oven.
Always outdoing himself, this torture and murder scene is the most sadistic yet. At this point in the novel, for many readers, the barrage of graphic sexual and violent language and action may have become so great that a desensitization to this kind of material can occur—perhaps paralleling the desensitization Bateman seems to experience in most aspects of his life. Additionally, this chapter is the first time the reader sees Bateman preparing the remains of one of his victims for consumption. Even more cannibalistic tendencies are on the horizon.
Themes
