Right off the back, it's apparent that Bret Easton Ellis is going to write this book using a writing style known as stream of consciousness. This is a literary technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur. The character that is describing his thoughts and feelings is named Patrick Bateman, who will be analyzed more closely in another post. The book opens with Patrick riding in a cab with his friends Timothy Price. They are heading to the house of Patrick's girlfriend, Evelyn Richards, for dinner. It's apparent that Patrick and his wall street buddies are extremely critical and intolerant, judging everybody they can based off of what they're wearing and their social status. The dinner guests include Evelyn, Patrick, Timothy, Courtney, and Stash and Vanden (Evelyn's artist friends). They all seem to not want to be around each other that much, but I'm guessing that all these people are only really friends because of what they have in common: money and social status. After everyone has left and only Evelyn, Price, Timothy, and Patrick remain, they begin to discuss and near blatantly mock Stash and Vanden. This seems like all their lives are. Very rich people with nothing better to do then mock those who are different. Patrick also assumes Timothy and Evelyn are having an affair, which strangely doesn't seem to bother him. The chapter called April fools ends with Evelyn refusing to have sex with Bateman, and Bateman going home.
The next chapter called Morning is a short one where almost the entire chapter is in the same paragraph describing Bateman's mourning routines. It tells of how he uses a multitude of different moisturizers and cleaning apparatuses in order to make himself as good looking as possible. The chapter's purpose is to give the reader insight on just how self-absorbed Patrick is. Nobody should care about how they look so much as to have over a dozen different steps just to get presentable for the day. In the following chapter named Harry's, Bateman and Timothy have what seems to be a daily breakfast/brunch with two of their colleagues, Craig McDermott and David Van Patten, who will be analyzed more closely in another post. They sit down and talk mindlessly, yet passionately, about a variety of things. Nobody at the table says anything of particular interest, which is exactly as the author intended. It's supposed to be a very average morning. The purpose of this chapter is to show who Bateman's core group of friends are and to depict how a typical morning's breakfast would take place.
thank you so much for these summaries
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