February

February functions as a calendar marker within the novel’s relentlessly ordered yet morally disordered world. Its appearance places the surrounding material in a recognizable annual sequence, while the events associated with the date expose the distance between ordinary social time and Patrick Bateman’s grotesque private reality.

Calendar Position

February is identified through the heading "Valentine's Day," linking the month to a culturally prescribed occasion of romance, intimacy, and exchange. In the novel’s broader chronology, such dates provide a polished social framework against which Bateman’s conduct becomes more sharply dissonant: the calendar promises affection and renewal, while his world remains governed by consumption, performance, and emotional vacancy.

The Date and Bateman’s Routine

The February passage opens on a Tuesday morning with Patrick Bateman standing by his desk in the living room, speaking on the telephone with his lawyer while watching The Patty Winters Show and observing a maid wax the floor. The domestic scene is not peaceful. The maid wipes blood smears from the walls and discards newspapers soaked with gore without comment, making routine household maintenance coexist with evidence of violence.

Bateman’s attention moves mechanically among unrelated details. He notices the maid’s apparent entrapment in a degraded world, then remembers that a piano tuner is due that afternoon and that a note must be left with the doorman. The Yamaha has never been played; its strings were pulled out after one of the girls fell against it, and Bateman later used those strings. The unused instrument therefore becomes another domestic object whose respectable surface conceals a violent history.

Media, Speech, and Consumption

The television continues to supply an intrusive stream of sensational material. On The Patty Winters Show, the host asks a child whether an orgy is another term for something else, while Bateman’s own telephone conversation concerns the need for more tax breaks. The juxtaposition places spectacle, sexuality, and financial self-interest within one undifferentiated field of attention.

A microwave timer then announces that a soufflé is being heated. The small, precise signal of domestic convenience arrives beside the blood on the walls, the gore-soaked newspapers, the lawyer’s call, and the televised discussion of sexual excess. February’s significance lies partly in this collision: the date does not interrupt Bateman’s routine but accommodates it, allowing ritualized public life and concealed brutality to occupy the same morning.

Narrative Significance

As a temporal entry, February helps organize the novel’s recurring patterns rather than marking a completed transformation. Its association with Valentine's Day produces an especially bitter contrast between the cultural language of love and Bateman’s inability to experience ordinary attachment. The month’s placement in the calendar offers order, but the scene attached to it reveals no corresponding moral order. Time advances through named occasions and weekly routines even as perception, responsibility, and human value have become radically unstable.