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...
The opening line of the novel quotes Dante's Inferno to draw an immediate link between Dante's vision of Hell—filled with legions of greedy and avaricious sinners—and the Wall Street milieu that Patrick inhabits. The "blood red" lettering anticipates the amount of bloodletting and violence that will occur over the course of the novel, whether real or imagined by Patrick.
“My life is a living hell,” I mention off the cuff, while casually moving leeks around on my plate, which by the way is a porcelain triangle. “And there are many more people I, uh, want to… want to, well, I guess murder.” I say emphasizing this last word, staring straight into Armstrong’s face.
Patrick seems to divulge his murderous impulses to a colleague named Armstrong over lunch, although Armstrong fails to react to his statement. Although the unreliability of Patrick's narration means that he may not in fact articulate these words aloud, Armstrong's indifference also parodies the self-obsessed and amoral nature of 1980s "yuppies."
It hits me that we have something in common, that we share a bond… the audience disappears and the music slows down… everything getting clearer, my body alive and burning, on fire, and from nowhere a flash of white and blinding light envelopes me and I hear it, can actually feel, can even make out the letters of the message hovering above Bono’s head in orange wavy letters: “I … am … the … devil … and I am … just … like … you …”
Patrick's moment of mutual recognition with U2's lead singer Bono seems also to be a moment of self-recognition, during which Patrick realizes that he is "the devil." The passage showcases Ellis's emphases on Patrick's dualistic personality—"the boy next door" versus "the devil"—as well as the subversive relationships between Patrick's sociopathy and popular culture.
I can already tell that it’s going to be a characteristically useless, senseless death, but then I’m used to the horror. It seems distilled, even now it fails to upset or bother me.
This quotation reflects how Patrick's desire to maim and kill has completely desensitized him. Like a drug addict who must gradually use in greater amounts to compensate for their tolerance, Patrick pursues his bloodlust until he is no longer able to feel anything at all, which causes him to have a nervous breakdown while cannibalizing—or imagining himself to cannibalize—one of his victims.
He stares at me as if we were both underwater and shouts back, very clearly over the din of the club, “Because … I had … dinner … with Paul Owen … in London … just ten days ago.”
This statement from Harold Carnes calls into question whether Patrick's murder of Paul Owen actually took place. Moreover, Patrick's shock at Carnes's words reveals that Patrick's narration is unreliable not just for the reader but even to himself, and suggests that much of the narrative of American Psycho has been fantasized and embellished.
“Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I’m twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh…” and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.
Ellis ends the book with Patrick's answer to an abstract question with philosophical and moral implications—"Why?" Patrick's superficial, ennui-laden response distills the apathy and amorality of late 1980s Wall Street. The phrase "This is what being Patrick means to me" may also be a meta-fictional reference to Ellis's own authorship of the sociopathic character Patrick Bateman.
I'm into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends.
Patrick says this while sitting at Nell's to a woman named Daisy, who seems to hear him say "mergers and acquisitions" instead of "murders and executions." The exchange exemplifies the novel's themes of mishearing and miscommunication, especially Patrick's inability to communicate his own pathological nature to others.
While taking a piss in the men's room I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No ... one ... would ... care.
Patrick is so humiliated that his younger brother Sean is easily able to reserve a table at Dorsia that he begins to dissociate in the bathroom while staring at a crack in the wall. His train of thought reflects the novel's themes of interchangeability and apathy, and Ellis uses the image of the "crack" here and elsewhere in the novel to symbolize the crumbling foundation of Patrick's sanity.
I shake my head to clear it and look back at Luis, who has this horrible, love-struck grin plastered on his face, and I try to squeeze harder, my face twisted with exertion, but I can't do it, my hands won't tighten, and my arms, still stretched out, look ludicrous and useless in their fixed position.
Patrick is mystified by his inability to harm Luis, who mistakes his attempted physical assault for a sexual advance. Patrick's failure to act on the impulses of his homophobic rage suggests that he may have unresolved or complex feelings for Luis that he never allows himself to acknowledge directly in the novel.
Daisy, what in god's name are you doing with a stud like Batman?
A woman named Francesca greets Patrick at Nell's by calling him "Batman"—a reference to Patrick's last name, as well as his Batman-like tendencies to adopt secret identities and commit vigilante acts of violence. Given that Tim Burton's Batman was released in 1989, the nickname is also another of the novel's references to 1980s-era Hollywood films.
