American Psycho By Bret Easton Ellis

Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho both show the stories of seemingly regular men based off of how they interact with people in their lives while in public view. The main characters from each novel are not normal functioning men of society. Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita is a middle aged man who has an obsession with young girls around the age of twelve. Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s American Psycho is an incredibly narcissistic, egotistic, man who is an investment banker by day and serial killer by night. Both men have had a privileged upbringing.

American Psycho is an incredible film with an even more brilliant cast; Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, and Reese Witherspoon, to name a few. When the scene opens, you see Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) going about a normal healthy life as a wealthy investment banker. But then you start to see the secret life he is leading as a serial killer. When he and his friends flaunt their business cards to each other, he gets jealous of coworker Paul Allen’s (Jarod Leto) card, he murders a homeless man and his dog out of rage. Bateman went to a Christmas party and was mistaken by Allen for another

Personality disorders are pervasive in nature, and are depicted in various mediums from film to novels. Narcissism will be discussed as it pertains to American Psycho; a film made in the early 2000’s to describe a man who lives a double life as a business man and serial killer. The main character in particular, Patrick Bateman displays with themes of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and his case along with the factors that are congruent with Narcissistic Personality Disorder will be discussed throughout.

Fifty years ago, a person breaking the law would either be called crazy or a criminal. Today, the mental health community has much more specific diagnoses. However, the explanation of certain behaviors may be difficult because there is much overlap among mental conditions. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is apparently simply a psychopath. However, Bateman can be diagnosed with other mental illnesses such as Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, narcissism, and antisocial personality disorder. In both the book and film adaptation, Bateman’s actions can be understood more accurately when analyzed in light of modern psychology.

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five he talks about many different themes. He quotes, makes fun of, and uses many different themes. I would like to talk about one major theme in Slaughterhouse Five, religion. In the book he uses religion to teach important lessons, he used it as inspiration, and he even pokes fun at religion.

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses to use special literary techniques that better explain his own encounters in war as well as help his readers bare the horridness of war. Vonnegut adds black humor in his text to benefit readers as well as “an author-as-character” perspective to set barriers and help protect his own memories in the war. Without adding these two specific devices, Vonnegut could possibly have lost reader’s interests in the book or lost his own interest in writing the book.

In Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there were two main characters that were in a battle to have the majority of control over the ward. Throughout the story, they engaged in different acts of stubbornness to see who could display the most power and which of the two could stand their ground the longest without giving in to the other. These two characters were: Randle McMurphy, a new patient who was determined to change the ways of the ward, and Nurse Ratched, the head nurse of the asylum who preferred to have complete control over everyone and everything.

Works of literature innately embody the author’s ideology and the historical context of the given time period. Within the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, the author furthers his ideals against the issue of oppression as he attempts to take stabs against its deteriorating effects and support those who rebel. Set in the microcosm of a small mental hospital, he establishes man’s external struggle to overcome tyranny. At the head of the head of the ward is the corrupted character of Nurse Ratched, who rules with an iron fist and the help of her machine like aides. It also features the nonconformist character, McMurphy, as he works to break Nurse Ratched’s endless cycle of tyranny. Although the novel shifts between the

Humans are desirous of numerous things. Money, power, pleasure, satisfaction, and surprisingly, celebrities are all things that lead to obsession. As people focus into these things, the result is utter and blatant madness, and eventually becomes the destruction of themselves and others. In the novel Misery by Stephen King, the mental instability of Annie Wilkes and the imprisonment of Paul Sheldon shows how obsession can lead to the destruction of others.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.

American Psycho is a movie adaptation directed by Marry Harron released in the year 2000 that was based off of the 1991 novel of the same name authored by Bret Easton Ellis. The movie focuses on the main character Patrick Bateman who is an investment banker in New York in the era of the early 1980’s. Patrick is a perfectionist whose life by day seemingly rotates between his picture-perfect job, his superficial relationship with his fiancée Evelyn, and his shallow interaction with his co-workers and peers. By night, Patrick is a textbook Psychopath and a serial killer.

Many times throughout one of Ken Kesey’s most famous novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the book uses animals as symbols to represent the story’s plot. The animals usually relate to individual characters and their current struggles within the story. Animal imagery provides us with great insight to the themes that Kesey is trying to have us explore, and is a very good tool that the reader can use to help better understand and relate to the characters.

In the novella The Body, author Stephen King makes an attempt to explain a story about losing innocence, only to be replaced by maturity and the corruption that comes with it. To do so, King revolves a story around a group of four boys who go on a life changing journey to find a dead body they heard about through the grape vine. Little did they know that pursuing this journey would eventually change them for the worse. In its entirety, the crux of the novella was to show how the experience of meeting death hands-on will pivot a person’s life and will either lead them onto a slippery slope or mold them in to a man soon to be. More specifically, King reinforces this theme beautifully by using light imagery during the

The literary element setting includes the time when the story happens and location where the story takes place. Some stories use variety of settings to initiate an interesting beginning. However, the 12 Angry Man has only one fixed setting – the jury room, which is not commonly used in a novel. The author, Reginald Rose, overcomes the limitation in setting by describing changes in weather, initiating different types of character and imitating the events of the murder.

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian