Criticism Of American Psycho, By Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho is a novel written by the American author Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis, as an author, has written and published seven literary works. American Psycho was written already in the 1980s, but it was published only in 1991. The novel had drawn a great deal of criticism even prior to its official release. When the novel was published in 1991 it was received with heavy criticism. Because of the novel’s dark nature Ellis had received death threats which suggested that Ellis should be dismembered as the victims of the novel’s fictional killer Patrick Bateman. The opinion on the novel among literary critics has changed ever since the novel had achieved cult status among readers. However, American Psycho still remains known primarily for the

American Psycho contains references to many brand names, companies and famous people. Companies such as American Express considered the possibility to take legal action against the book because the book’s protagonist Patrick Bateman in several cases uses his American Express platinum card to scoop cocaine and in a couple of cases orders prostitutes, with his American Express platinum card, that he will later kill. Before publishing the book, Vintage Books made some changes and one of them was the name of the company that Bateman works for. In the Simon & Schuster version he was working in the American Express’s Shearson unit, but in the Vintage Books version he was working for a fictional firm Pierce & Pierce. (Baelo-Allue,

Big names such as The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and The Nation wrote and printed articles on the publication process and the controversy the book was generating. Because of all the critics and the articles American Psycho turned into an excuse to discuss more general issues like censorship, the limits of serious fiction and the role of corporations. Many reviews were written, but very few of them were explained and most of them did not seriously analyse the book’s stylistic features or literary choices. The critics and reviewers feared that Ellis was changing the boundary between what was acceptable and what was not acceptable in serious literature. The fact that Ellis was bringing the lowest type of writing, namely gore and pornography, into a higher type of writing was too much for the book to be given serious consideration. Bret Easton Ellis redraws the limits with his novel American Psycho and he deserves a more serious consideration than the one he received after the initial