Theme Study 1 (cont.)

During his break up with Evelyn, she begins to yell at him and bombard him with questions, none of which he pays attention to. Instead, he's thinking of many things, some important, others senseless. One of them was "raping one of my maids at age fourteen," and one other was simply "surface, surface, surface" (pg. 342). The fact that Ellis blatantly tells us that all Patrick thinks about is "surface surface surface" directly correlates to theme of  the shallow and sadistic aspects of capitalism. This theme has remained constant throughout the entire novel.A huge businessman on Wall Street, who is a capitalist and surrounds himself with other capitalists, thinks about only whats on the cover, not the contents of anything. Maybe it's his mental illness, or maybe it's just the way most wealthy businessmen act, but nothing besides physical appearance and monetary value matter to him at all. He gets so little enjoyment out of everything that he resorts to something as drastic as homicide to fulfill this hole.