Summer

Summer functions as a crucial temporal state in Patrick Bateman's trajectory rather than as a season of renewal. It is described as a prolonged stupor, a period in which restaurants, taxis, videotapes, nightclubs, movie theaters, and the abandoned building in Hell's Kitchen form a repetitive circuit. Within that circuit, ordinary luxury and spectacular violence become indistinguishable: the season's defining movement is not development but recurrence, while Bateman's nightly bloodlust begins to overflow into the daytime.

The Season as Stupor

Most of the summer is spent moving through interchangeable sites of consumption and distraction. Bateman sits in old or newly opened restaurants, watches videotapes in his apartment, rides in the backs of cabs, visits nightclubs and movie theaters, and returns to the building in Hell's Kitchen. The list is deliberately repetitive. Instead of giving the season a stable setting, the narration produces a loop of interiors, vehicles, screens, and fashionable venues in which time seems to pass without accumulating into experience.

The surrounding city supplies a parallel spectacle. Four major air disasters occur during the summer, most of them captured on videotape and replayed endlessly on television. The planes crash in slow motion; cameras then roam over wreckage, burned bodies, and rescue workers retrieving remains. The repeated images turn catastrophe into a media object, and the mediated repetition echoes Bateman's own compulsive returns to violence, entertainment, and consumption. The season's public horrors are not presented as an interruption to private excess but as part of the same culture of viewing.

Consumption and Social Performance

The season is also marked by small, concrete signs of status, irritation, and bodily unease. Bateman begins using Oscar de la Renta men's deodorant, which produces a slight rash, while a heavily publicized film about a small talking bug grosses more than two hundred million dollars and the Mets perform badly. These details place commercial success, celebrity entertainment, sport, and personal discomfort within the same flat register: each is noticed, catalogued, and then absorbed into the season's blankness.

In August, Bateman repeatedly takes summer associates to flashy new restaurants before bringing them to Les Misérables. During dinner he asks whether anyone has seen The Toolbox Murders on HBO, and the tables fall silent when he raises the subject. He responds by summoning the waiter, ordering sorbet or another bottle of San Pellegrino, and assuring them that the film was quite good. The scene exposes the gap between his conversational performance and the appetites he cannot safely disclose. Even among people selected for proximity to his social world, his references to violent entertainment produce a momentary refusal of shared language.

His American Express Platinum Card snaps in half during one of these dinners, after he takes two summer associates to Restless and Young, the new Pablo Lester restaurant in midtown. The broken card is a compact image of excess: the instrument of conspicuous consumption has been used so relentlessly that it physically fails, although Bateman can still pay with cash from his gazelleskin wallet. At the same time, the Patty Winters Shows are all repeats. Luxury, media, and social ritual continue mechanically, but none supplies novelty or relief.

The Approach to Frenzy

By the end of the season, Bateman describes life as a blank canvas, a cliché, and a soap opera. The sequence of abstractions does not open onto reflection; it confirms that experience has become an exhausted set of prefabricated forms. He feels lethal and on the verge of frenzy, and his nightly bloodlust has begun to invade the day. The distinction between private murderous impulse and public routine therefore weakens: restaurants and offices no longer contain the violence but become places through which it travels.

The language of a slipping mask of sanity makes the seasonal crisis explicit. The mask is not presented as a secure identity that occasionally hides a secret self; its impending slippage suggests that the performance of normality is itself becoming unsustainable. Summer thus marks an escalation in Patrick Bateman's depersonalization. The more repetitively he consumes images, meals, travel, and entertainment, the less capable he appears of locating a stable self beneath them.

Aftermath and Return

The season ends in the need for escape. Bateman calls it his bone season and says that he needs a vacation, specifically a trip to the Hamptons. The destination is not framed as a restorative landscape so much as a temporary removal from the city whose routines have become inseparable from his bloodlust. His wish to leave follows the collapse of containment, making the seasonal transition a practical response to an internal crisis.

A later rainy Tuesday morning revisits the consequences of the period through Paul Owen's apartment on the Upper East Side. One hundred and sixty-one days have passed since Bateman spent the night there with two escort girls. He reports that no bodies have appeared in any of the city's four newspapers or on local news, and that no rumor seems to exist. He has questioned dates and business acquaintances over dinners and has asked in the halls of Pierce & Pierce whether anyone heard about two mutilated prostitutes found in Paul Owen's apartment. No one acknowledges the event, leaving Bateman to assume that no bodies have been found and even to wonder whether Donald Kimball has moved to London.

The return produces a stark reversal in the apparent solidity of the past. Bateman still possesses the keys stolen from Owen on the night he killed him, yet they no longer fit the lobby door. A new uniformed doorman opens the entrance and casually asks whether Bateman is coming in or staying outside in the rain. Bateman has brought a surgical mask to deal with the smell and carries a Walkman while considering what to say, but the changed building refuses to confirm his memory. Summer therefore remains suspended between crime and uncertainty: its violence is intensely present to Bateman, while the outside world offers no corresponding evidence that it happened.