December

December functions in the novel less as a neutral calendar label than as a recurring temporal frame for the collision between social ceremony and Patrick Bateman's emotional and moral vacancy. Its appearances place consumer habits, television, restaurants, family obligations, and coercive violence within the same seasonal atmosphere, making the month a setting in which ordinary December routines continue without registering the damage occurring beneath them.

December as Repeated Temporal Marker

December recurs through Bateman's narration in scenes that resist a stable, progressive sense of time. After the disposal of Paul Owen's body, Bateman lies awake around two in the morning, listening to messages and watching a recording of The Patty Winters Show about Deformed People. The moment combines sleeplessness, mediated spectacle, and the aftermath of murder, while Evelyn Richards's call is answered through a staged telephone message rather than an honest exchange. In another passage, the same program is said to have concerned Salad Bars, and the subject is repeated as Bateman prepares for an evening at Dorsia, giving the date a compulsive, mechanically recurring quality rather than a secure chronological one.

Social Routine and Seasonal Consumption

The month is also embedded in the material rituals of Bateman's social world. A tie bought for Sean Bateman at Paul Smith becomes an object Bateman chooses to keep and wear to the Quilted Giraffe; in its place, he considers giving Sean a Casio QD-150 Quick-Dialer combination wristwatch, calculator, and data bank. The gift's technical capacity to store fifty names and numbers becomes an occasion for Bateman to mock Sean's limited circle of acquaintances. The scene turns seasonal or familial gift-giving into another display of status, contempt, and calculated presentation.

Dinner at Dorsia continues the same pattern of ceremony masking hostility. Sean Bateman has reserved a table for nine, but arrives half an hour late, leaving Bateman unable to obtain the prime booth because the maître d' refuses to seat him alone. Bateman controls his rage with Xanax and Absolut on the rocks, yet his thoughts move toward disappearance and the belief that some people are unnecessary to the world. December's social calendar therefore offers no fellowship or relief: restaurants, gifts, and scheduled meetings become surfaces against which isolation and aggression sharpen.

Christmas-Eve Coercion and Emotional Detachment

The clearest December scene occurs four days before Christmas, at two in the afternoon. Bateman sits in the back of a pitch-black limousine parked before a nondescript brownstone off Fifth Avenue, reading an article about Donald Trump in Fame magazine while Jeanette is led inside. She has a black eye from the previous night, and Bateman states that he had coerced her over dinner at Il Marlibro and later subjected her to a more forceful discussion at his apartment before she consented to what is being arranged.

Jeanette's visible distress is set against Bateman's refusal of emotional responsibility. During the drive from his apartment on the Upper West Side, she has been sobbing, while the narrator identifies her desperation and possible longing but says that her dilemma lies outside his definition of guilt. After taking two Xanax, he tells her that she is incapable of upsetting him; as she leaves the limousine, he offers the supposedly consoling assurances that it is for the best and that she should not take it so seriously. The language of reassurance does not soften the scene. It exposes how Bateman converts another person's fear into a problem of inconvenience and manages the encounter as an extension of his own self-control.

The details of Jeanette's appearance intensify the contrast between seasonal normality and coercion. She wears the leopard-print cotton balmacaan coat with wool challis lining and a wool crepe shirtless dress by Bill Bless, garments catalogued with the same precision Bateman applies to restaurants, drinks, and accessories. After she enters the brownstone, he sighs and waves her off, remaining in the limousine with Finnish Absolut vodka and a pronounced suntan. The surface is polished, specific, and socially legible; the underlying action is marked by injury, pressure, and indifference.

Television, Repetition, and the Month's Narrative Function

December repeatedly places Bateman's interior condition beside popular entertainment. The Patty Winters Show appears as a recurring morning reference, with its subjects shifting or being repeated across scenes, while the Christmas-period passage reports that Bigfoot was interviewed and seemed surprisingly articulate and charming. Such details give the month a media-saturated texture in which extraordinary bodies, celebrity material, and human suffering are consumed as interchangeable programming.

The narration's treatment of December also weakens ordinary temporal reliability. A heading-like return to the month is followed by sharply different situations: sleeplessness after Owen's concealment, gift planning and restaurant frustration involving Sean Bateman, and the Christmas-period coercion of Jeanette. The recurrence creates a pattern more than a clean chronology. December becomes the calendar form of Bateman's repetition: social appointments recur, consumer objects recur, television topics recur, and emotional vacancy persists beneath them.

Significance

As a seasonal time, December carries expectations of intimacy, generosity, and communal belonging, but Bateman's scenes systematically hollow those expectations out. Gifts become instruments of ridicule, dinners become tests of access and delay, Christmas approaches alongside coercion, and the private aftermath of violence is accompanied by television and telephone routines. The month thus crystallizes the novel's contrast between appearance and reality: a recognizable social season continues to function on the outside while Bateman's narration reveals a world organized by insomnia, contempt, mediated distraction, and the inability—or refusal—to recognize another person's suffering.