October

October functions less as a fully described season than as a recurring unit of measurement in Patrick Bateman’s disordered consciousness. It appears beside calendars, appointments, consumer rituals, and threats of disappearance, giving the passage of time a sterile administrative form while exposing how little stability that form provides. October’s significance lies in this tension: it promises sequence and control, yet the narration repeatedly turns dates into signs of repetition, dread, and uncertainty.

Calendar Time and Consumer Routine

In one episode, Patrick Bateman prepares for an evening at the Quilted Giraffe after a call involving Sean Bateman. He considers withholding a tie bought for Sean at Paul Smith and instead bringing a Casio QD-150 Quick-Dialer combination wristwatch, calculator, and data bank. The device stores up to fifty names and numbers, and its elaborate functionality becomes part of the narrator’s contemptuous assessment of Sean’s social world. The calendar does not organize an emotionally meaningful life here; it schedules gifts, restaurants, phone calls, and status objects. Even the morning’s episode of The Patty Winters Show, which concerns salad bars, is repeated as though the day’s media content were another item in an inventory.

The planned dinner also shows how calendar time collides with failed expectation. Sean Bateman reserves a table at Dorsia for nine, but later arrives half an hour late, leaving Patrick Bateman waiting while the maître d' refuses to seat him. A prime booth remains empty across from the bar, turning an ordinary appointment into a display of suspended time and social exclusion. Patrick Bateman controls his rage with Xanax and Absolut on the rocks, yet the delay magnifies a much larger fear: that his absence would pass unnoticed and that no one would care if he disappeared.

Repetition, Recall, and Ominous Time

In the office sequence, time is represented through an act of mechanical erasure. While reading a best seller about management and waiting amid Craig McDermott’s fax frenzy, Patrick Bateman crosses out the days in his calendar that have already passed. The gesture suggests progress, but it is also repetitive and vacant: the days are not remembered as experiences, only marked off as completed units. The calendar therefore becomes a material image of depersonalization, reducing lived time to lines removed from a page.

The same office passage is filled with returns rather than forward movement. Madonna lyrics intrude repeatedly into Patrick Bateman’s thoughts, while the phrase “isolated farmhouse” comes back over and over and produces nameless dread. Reports of bodies recovered from a yacht and bottled-water poisonings intensify the sense that the present is becoming increasingly random and difficult to interpret. Within this atmosphere, October carries the pressure of recurrence: it belongs to a calendar whose order remains visible even as the narrator’s grasp of events becomes less secure.

The Return of Timothy Price

The second major time reference is attached to Timothy Price’s apparent reappearance. Patrick Bateman introduces the moment cautiously, saying that Tim Price “resurfaces, or at least I'm pretty sure he does.” That qualification makes the month’s chronology inseparable from unreliable narration. The issue is not simply when Price returns, but whether the return can be treated as an objectively confirmed event at all.

Jean announces that Timothy Price wants to speak with Patrick Bateman, who responds fearfully and instructs her to send him in. Price then enters the Pierce & Pierce office dressed in a wool suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Bless, and cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. Patrick Bateman pretends to be on the phone while Price sits across from him at the Palazzetti glass-top desk. A smudge on Price’s forehead—or at least something Patrick Bateman thinks he sees there—adds another perceptual uncertainty to the encounter.

The exchange is brief. Patrick Bateman asks where Price has been, and Timothy Price answers that he has been “making the rounds” before announcing that he is back. The casualness of the reply contrasts with Patrick Bateman’s fear and with the surrounding reports of violence, disappearance, and public panic. October thus becomes a temporal hinge between ordinary professional routine and the possible return of someone whose status in the narrator’s world is uncertain.

Narrative Significance

October’s function is structural rather than scenic. It supplies a recognizable calendar framework for scenes that otherwise resist dependable chronology. Appointments are made and missed, days are crossed out, memories and phrases recur, and a supposedly returning colleague may be either physically present or filtered through a damaged perception. The month’s ordinary name becomes a quiet counterpoint to the narrator’s increasingly extraordinary claims.

Through October, the novel places bureaucratic time beside psychological time. Clock time advances through reservations, phone calls, workdays, and crossed-off dates, while subjective time stalls around dread, repetition, and the possibility of disappearance. The resulting contrast reinforces the novel’s larger concern with the gap between appearance and reality: a calendar can certify that days have passed, but it cannot guarantee that the experiences assigned to those days occurred as described, or that the people occupying them remain securely identifiable.