American Psycho
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Is confusion of names a theme or am I just easily confused?
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Basically yes - it's a theme. These guys have no identify as they basically look the same, dress the same, have the same jobs, sleep with the same women, go to places to eat/drink.
Movie conveys this really well.
Yeah, I saw the movie a while back but only half-watched it. It's not just me then. The author is actually doing a great job conveying it.... I'm 30% in and you can certainly tell who the main characters are because they're the only names you can remember.
And it's not just how similar they look.They all quote the same magazine articles verbatim to each other.
Truly an insular culture :)
Right. They are faceless, indistinguishable from each other. I could be wrong in my interpretation, but I don't actually think that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. I think that's part of the joke, that the psychopathic serial killer is the only one in the story who could tell it reliably. Bateman is rebelling against the materialism in his own way, he's different from the others. He hates them, along with the rest of the world. The rest of his social circle/economic peers really have no feelings outside of their own immediate desires. This forces us to see him as a sympathetic character, to identify with him a little bit. It's really a much deeper and more clever book than it's given credit for.
Dalia, I agree with you about the irony of Bateman being a reliable narrator. However, Bateman wants to be a part of that group and culture as much as he despises it, at least in my view. He is disgusted when one of his colleague's has a better business card than him, and and quotes the articles as much as any of the others. If anything they always come to him for advice on that front. Bateman becomes just as much a part of the materialistic culture as everyone else is. Perhaps though, the sympathy comes from the fact that Bateman is trapped in this society, one that he is by turns repelled by and yet always seeking to be at the centre of. The flat tone that is similarly applied to describing the pros and cons of lapels and the mutiliation of women with a nailgun can then be seen as a sign of his resignation to this tragic irony.
Phylicia I agree - mixing people up and forgetting their names is deliberate. It's as CJ says, it's to delivered the message that the characters within the novel are interchangeable and have lost all identity and any idiosyncratic features: it's a clever satire on Capitalism itself where the characters are reduced to consumers and nothing more.
Will, I think you hit the nail on the head. I believe it is mentioned that Bateman's father was already wealthy - even more successful than Bateman is. Patrick, therefore, isn't actually getting into that world, he was born there. He hates it without having anything else he could tolerate as an alternative. And since he feels superior, he also bridles if one of those inferior people manage to best him at anything at all.
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Thoughts? I like how they don't shove it down your throat. They make you aware of it the first time it happens, and then it just continues through the book.