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because these are disturbing texts there are disturbing things discussed!! (cannibalism, SA, prejudice, violence, etc) be mindful of that before reading !!
‘American Psycho’ and ‘The Road’ are both narratives full of immoral actions. We are made complicit to the protagonist’s crimes in ‘American Psycho’ through Easton Ellis’ use of first-person narration, and are subjected to witnessing the man-made horrors and considering the dilemmas of the wasteland the protagonists inhabit in McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. However, both novels arguably comment on morality within the surface-level narrative, through the use of intertextual references and religious imagery, and the case can be made for both novels that they are protest writing, as the narratives contain messages that provide commentary on society and the systems and hierarchies we exist within. By including this, the novelists question the morality of allowing the harm that comes from these systems.
One example of this protest writing is the feminist reading that can be applied to both texts. They can be viewed through this lens to extract commentary on the morality of disregarding women and assigning them restrictive roles. Literary critic Irvine Welsh describes ‘American Psycho’ as a novel which ‘focuses on the ennui of morally bankrupt extreme privilege’ Ellis uses the perspectives of Bateman and the other socialites around him to explore gender roles and the threat of male violence in modern American society. During the ‘me’ culture of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s and the economic boom, consumerism and individualism ran rampant, creating figures Bateman can be used as a device to aptly satirise and demonstrate that excess the characters surround themselves with doesn’t denote worthiness, conveyed through their lack of simple values like equality. ‘American Psycho’ is told through the first-person perspective of a misogynist, who sees women as only commodities. He uses chauvinistic language when talking to other male characters, such as the use of metonymy when speaks about women reductively, even while describing violent fantasies or actions. For example, he entertains the idea of torturing a woman and a dog by switching their blood, “[pumping] the dog’s blood into the hardbody and vice versa”. Bateman’s misogyny is made apparent through how he metaphorically deems a woman and a dog equals in this hypothetical, as Bateman wants to exchange parts of them, he must believe them to be compatible or, at least, worthy of the same torture. Bateman describes women as "hardbodies" throughout the text. The plurality of this noun suggests he does not view women as individuals, as “bodies” demonstrates that he views women as just common nouns: objects. Ellis’ decision to have Bateman objectify women in his immoral and violent fantasies allows him to convey that this is all Bateman views women as, regardless of the context. This mirrors aspects of slasher horror contemporary to the time of writing. The novel was written shortly after the ‘Golden Age’ of slasher horror from 1978-1984, and was influenced by the films from before its time. The genre became popular as the1970s and 1980s saw a rise in anxieties surrounding youth culture, crime, and social issues, which were often incorporated in slasher films. This connection is reinforced by a speech Bateman gives where he recites what he has heard about “civil rights”, returning to “traditional moral values”, and the need to “promote general social concern and less materialism in young people”, mirroring the factors that led to the success of the slasher genre and demonstrating Ellis’ awareness of the social climate surrounding the novel and contemporary horror films. As argued by critic Carol J. Clover, in her book, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” The genre can be described as a revenge fantasy in reaction to increasing freedoms women obtained in the 70s, where the victims were often young women who drank, smoked, or had sex. This aspect of Bateman’s character can be explained in a similar way; his disdain for women translates to extreme violence, which is often sexual in nature. This alignment with a typical slasher film villain portrays Bateman as truly irredeemable and immoral,
McCarthy’s method of presentation of morality differs, as his views on the patriarchy have to be conveyed despite a lack of present female characters in The Road. The focus put onto men and the male perspective through the third person narrative voice makes the novel phallocentric and subtextually suggests the narrator holds a disregard for the perspective of women. The narrator is never identified or named, and does not interfere with the events of the novel, but acts as an omnipotent observer. As this observer chooses to focus on largely only male characters, the readers are given the impression of men as the default. In addition to this, The Woman is more concerned about the harm that could befall her and her family than The Man is. In her own dialogue, she sets herself apart from The Man and demeans herself through her description of her belief that “women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves” and goes on to say that she is “done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time”. The first quotation furthers a traditional portrayal of women’s gender role as caring only for others rather than themselves, and as nurturing and self sacrificing for the benefit of a family, which is an altruistic and morally good way to live. However, she seems to feel she doesn’t conform to this. This is conveyed through the metaphor in the second quotation, displaying that she is no longer devoting her ”heart” to others as a representation of her emotional labour. “Done” displays that she is casting aside the expectation that she should display a high level of compassion, as well as more directly reflecting her lack of desire to keep living in the dire circumstances they are in. The personification of her heart as “whorish” on its own also alludes to a rejection of the typical gender expectations of a married woman, as it suggests a lack of loyalty to her husband, which in this case doesn’t refer to her taking another “lover”, but her plans to take her own life. Her use of degrading and misogynistic language suggests a disdain for women who deviate from gender expectations, or who are sexually liberated. This could be a reflection of McCarthy’s WW2 era upbringing in the 1930s and 1940s, when traditional roles and the nuclear family were held in high regard. She is afraid of all the immorality she witnesses and tells him people “are going to rape [her]” and “they’ll rape [her son]”, followed by “They are going to rape us [...] you wont face it”, suggesting McCarthy is conscious that The Woman is fearful of sexual violence against herself and her child, rather than sexual violence being perpetrated against her husband, inviting readers to consider what she has experienced already to make her feel this way. In combination with his presentation of her character, rather than sympathy, this reads as benevolent misogyny. The character of The Woman describes herself as heartless, making it unlikely McCarthy’s aim is for the reader to pity her. Bateman commits acts of sexual violence as well as cannibalism, predominantly against women, the main fears that The Woman had, and Ellis makes a similar feminist statement with his novel. Both demonstrate acts of male violence against women which are rarely followed with justice. Through a feminist reading of the novel, McCarthy and Ellis both demonstrate that the threat of these disgusting acts is more present for women, urging us to consider the morality of the patriarchy.
However, McCarthy also writes incorporating narrative misogyny. McCarthy “draws a very heavy line in the sand between giving up and persevering. Very often, this line in the sand adheres to strict gender lines”. The Woman appears through flashbacks in The Man’s mind as an anaphoric reference. This non-linear storytelling limits her to a fragment we can only experience through a male perspective. She is sexualised at times and vilified at others. When she is leaving, The Man asks “will you tell him goodbye?” she responds “No. I will not.”. The abrupt sentence fragment “No.” and modal verb “will” convey certainty, depicting her as cold and stubborn, and making it harder to sympathise with her actions than if she had explained herself. The mother figure of the boy is deceased and her death is only the inciting incident to drive the male characters closer. The Man is valorised while she is presented as selfish and villainised for her suicide. He nurtures the boy and fulfils the roles of both parents, without the presence of a mother, showing her as superfluous. Therefore, while both texts explore the morality of misogyny, they are not both without fault.
The role of The Man in McCarthy’s writing can be interpreted as a representation of post-feminist fatherhood, suggesting that mothers are not as important as fathers. ‘Post-feminism’ refers to the alleged decrease in support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. Some felt that gender equality had already been achieved, due to factors like the rising median age of marriage for women reaching 25 by 1997, liberating them sexually and giving them increased economic power. Factors such as this led to the postfeminist perspective becoming a relevant and somewhat popular view at McCarthy's time of writing. This contrasts American Psycho, which was “borne as an adaptive and activist response to the underlying anti-feminist attitudes of post-feminism”.
Both novelists use their writing as a means to explore the moral downfalls of capitalism. Viewing the text through a Marxist lens, centering American Psycho around Wall Street allows Ellis to subtextually link immorality to 80s excess and the top one percent of society, and to satirise contemporary capitalist society and ground his critiques by using a specific example to demonstrate broader concepts. The lack of empathy Bateman has for those ranking lower in the social hierarchy may have been influenced by Ellis’ experience living through the AIDs crisis and seeing the lack of support from the conservative government. McCarthy is able to critique capitalism through the power dynamics in ‘The Road’, with those who have supplies representing the ruling class, and those who don’t as the working and middle class. McCarthy is able to use this microcosm of a simplified post-apocalyptic society to explore the exploitation of workers by the bourgeois, represented metaphorically through cannibalism practised by the ruling class. While the settings differ vastly, both can be related to Marxist theories on profit, as Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker, and there is no morally good consumption under this system.
McCarthy was born in 1933 in Rhode Island, in America, living through World War 2 and the Cold War. Being under constant threat of nuclear war and being versed in political happenings at the whims of the ruling class may have inspired him to depict their representation as arguably the most savage in the novel. The symbolism of cannibalism and cannibals is used as representation of the politics of external conquest, internal colonization, and territorial consolidation, and in both novels, this is specifically referring to the ruling class. When applying Marxist theory, cannibalism is a metaphor for the exploitation of the working class by the wealthy. “The Road portrays the ruination of both humanity and humanism” as those who are eaten are reduced to the status of commodities like cattle, contradicting the idea that humans have value beyond that of animals regardless of status, as before discovering people “locked” in the cellar, The Man comments “this is locked for a reason”, assuming food must be hidden inside from the context. This is incredibly similar to how Bateman - a wealthy Wall Street worker and member of the ruling class- consumes some of his victims, notably only the ones who would be considered as lower on the hierarchy they exist within. Critic John Paul Rollert even described ‘American Psycho’ as “the single most damning critique of the cultural consequences of contemporary capitalism.” and claims this is done by “drawing a parallel between the ritualistic displays of domination on Wall Street and the predations of an actual psychopath” enabling Ellis to show how “soft sadism shades into truly violent behavior” and to suggest that “the peculiar customs of the commercial elite can blind us to the difference” between the two. As well as how he and ‘yuppies’ like him prey on minorities and the working class, Bateman's cannibalism is a metaphor for his hyper-consumerist appetites and his insatiable drive to dominate others through the acquisition of power, focusing primarily on women. Ellis is likening the mindless and animalistic way Bateman consumes other people to the way he and the people he surrounds himself with consume commodities; to him, one method of immoral consumption isn’t that much different than another. Bateman's consumption of his victims' represents his attempt to "get to know these girls" as a perverse attempt to understand other humans, something robbed of him by capitalist American society’s individualism and commodity fetishism, which only serves to worsen his psychopathy. “The proletariat lives a truly inhuman life, while the bourgeoisie lives a falsely human life. And this is why the proletariat desires to be truly human and the bourgeoisie does not” This is demonstrated by Bateman’s inability to understand other humans in any normal way, and his feeling that he needs to consume others to have any form of connection, particularly by predating on those with less social capital and status, as well as the way those who cannibalise others in The Road are dehumanized as “The bad guys”, making them an abstract concept of humans as a result of their treatment of others as like cattle as they slowly carve them, one man is even described as having his “legs gone to the hip”, implying he is being cut into like inanimate meat incrementally, showing no regard for mercy.
Both writers use religion and intertextuality to construct meaning surrounding the morality of the characters they narrate. ‘American Psycho’ opens with Hellish imagery linked to the setting as “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank [...] leaving Wall Street”. This is an intertextual reference to ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and subtextually evokes Hellish imagery, suggesting that Wall Street is similar to the Gates of Hell and aligning the materialistic values of the financial district with the values of the devil himself, leading some readers to theorise that the novel is set in Hell, as the endless cycle of excess in both violence and luxury could be seen as a punishment for all of the characters for their lack of morals. This opening line also foreshadows the terrible events that are yet to come, but the more apparent implication to first-time readers is similar to aforementioned Marxist theories on the morality of wealth. This symbolism is dotted throughout the novel, and references again at the very end, as the novel’s final words, (“This is not an exit”) are an allusion to Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit, which depicts deceased people locked in a room together for eternity, and reflect how the immoral systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy that enabled Bateman to never be caught and reprimanded will persist, keeping all of society trapped in this same way, as if in Hell. Beginning and ending the novel with declarative or imperative statements regarding the setting, likening it to Hell with intertextuality, gives it a somewhat cyclical structure, leading the reader to presume the end of the novel doesn’t mean the end of these events, and the implication of continuation and repetition is also similar to notions of Hell or Purgatory.
Depicting the setting of the novel as a barren moral desert alike to Hell is not unique to Ellis; McCarthy’s post apocalyptic landscape also uses hellish imagery, such as a ‘charred’ body of an ‘infant’, and like Dante’s Inferno, is speculative fiction (set on a barren wasteland with a caste system, allowing the author to convey the issues with a society structured in this way) about a hellscape and morality. Mccarthy also conveys that the characters all feel trapped, and can’t even envision anything better, as nobody “wants to be here and nobody wants to leave”. However, in McCarthy’s writing, the implications of relation to the devil are less direct than in Ellis’, and done through contrast. The Man describes The Boy (the conscience of the novel, who would represent his father’s superego, in Freudian terms, as he often leads him to do morally good things, such as feeding a stranger they come across) as “the word of God”, and claims that if he is not, “God never spoke”. The omnipotent narrator who watches over The Boy and The Man without interfering also mimics a figure like a God, which is strengthened through intertextual references to the content and terminology of The Bible, possibly as a result of McCarthy’s own Irish Catholic faith. This idea is even alluded to more directly as McCarthy writes “There is no God and we are his prophets”, suggesting that God has abandoned them and won’t help, but they are still somehow linked together, as well as portraying The Man and his son as more enlightened than the average person on the road through their status as “prophets”. “The most iconic presence of God in The Road is found in the honesty, piety, and sincerity of the son, who serves as an at times explicit icon of Christ.” Even the vocatives of “The Man” and “The Boy” somewhat mirror the idea of the holy trinity, as it contains ‘the father’ and ‘the son’, portraying them as pure like holy pillars of morality. Additionally, these terms result in descriptions of their actions sounding somewhat like Bible stories containing unnamed characters, as they are also often named after their roles and what they allegorically represent. This imagery used to describe the one clearly morally good character allows readers to draw the conclusion that if The Boy and ‘the good guys’ are god-like, the cannibals and the ‘bad guys’ who are in opposition to him must be more aligned with the devil, as this contrast draws that parallel between them and those who “bear more of the mark of Cain than the image and likeness of their Divine Maker.” Through these comparisons, both novelists align acts such as rape and cannibalism with the devil, demonstrating a moral conviction that these actions are the worst two things you can do to another person and makes you one of ‘the bad guys’ in an already corrupt society.
There is a motif of moral code in McCarthy’s writing, as the two protagonists often reference the concepts of ‘the good guys’ and ‘the bad guys’, with the only clear defining factor between the two being if they decide to participate in cannibalism. The Man views being eaten as the worst possible death, as he keeps a pistol so The Boy can commit suicide before being eaten by ‘bad guys’. The desperation to avoid this fate paired with the motif implying that the last sign of morality left to cling to is not cannibalising others allows McCarthy to construct a powerful metaphor to demonstrate how morally abhorrent certain acts are, as though they are degrees worse than others.
To conclude, both novels are explorations of the limits of human morality, and what is and isn’t morally acceptable, as many cruel characters exist in each setting, but few apparent lines are drawn to demonstrate which of them are actually good people, and even fewer examples of those good people, with only The Boy existing as a truly morally good character, who is likened to God. The acts condemned the most by each writer are rape and cannibalism, demonstrated through associating the characters behind these disgusting acts with the devil. In ‘American Psycho’ Ellis does this directly through the symbolism in the novel describing the setting and characters, and in ‘The Road’ this is done through the reader’s assumption due to the opposition of the “good guys”, who have “the word of God” among them and the “bad guys”, the cannibals. Interestingly, both novelists explore the morality of hierarchies, particularly the class system and capitalism, as well as the patriarchy. Ellis and McCarthy demonstrate awareness that women have more reason to fear male violence and sexual assault, and seem to convey this purposely to pressure readers to consider the reasons for this. However, while Ellis and critics have outwardly described ‘American Psycho’ as a feminist text, ‘The Road’ is not as apparent in its advocacy for women, as the novel also entails some narrative misogyny, as centering the father figure and vilifying the mother portrays her as superlative and selfish, aligning these aspects of McCarthy’s writing with post-feminist ideas, making it an imperfect piece of protest writing.
The writers both set their novels in an environment where the consequences of a capitalistic hierarchy are saturated, as there are large disparities between the wealthy and the poor in the financial district of late 80s New York and in a speculative post apocalyptic future. Ellis’ decision to focus on contemporary society grounds his criticism, making it almost relatable to readers, while McCarthy creates an alien environment to demonstrate the dire outcomes of persisting under a system so lacking in compassion. Both use the microcosm they have created to demonstrate the exploitative nature of these systems, and the morality of the wealthy both literally and figuratively consuming the disadvantaged.
Bibliography
1- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/american-psycho-bret-easton-ellis-irvine-welsh accessed 17/12/24
“focuses on the ennui of morally bankrupt extreme privilege”
2- https://openlibrary.org/books/OL20408594M/Men_women_and_chainsaws
accessed 23/3/25
3- https://deborahhawkinsblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/women-in-the-road/
Accessed 1/3/2025
“draws a very heavy line in the sand between giving up and persevering. Very often, this line in the sand adheres to strict gender lines”
4-
https://time.com/5310256/90s-gender-equality-progress/
Accessed 18/3/2025
Statistic that the median age of marriage for women reached 25 by 1997
Accessed 1/3/2025
“Borne as an adaptive and activist response to the underlying anti-feminist attitudes of post-feminism”
6- https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1704341.pdf
Accessed 2/3/25
“The Road portrays the ruination of both humanity and humanism”
7- https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/savage-ethics-american-psycho
Accessed 2/1/25
“The single most damning critique of the cultural consequences of contemporary capitalism”
“drawing a parallel between the ritualistic displays of domination on Wall Street and the predations of an actual psychopath”
“Soft sadism shades into truly violent behaviour”
“The peculiar customs of the commercial elite can blind us to the difference”
Accessed /2/3/25
“The proletariat lives a truly inhuman life, while the bourgeoisie lives a falsely human life. And this is why the proletariat desires to be truly human and the bourgeoisie does not”
9- https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/flecks-of-faith-in-the-road
Accessed 2/3/2025
The most iconic presence of God in The Road is found in the honesty, piety, and sincerity of the son, who serves as an at times explicit icon of Christ.”
10- https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/flecks-of-faith-in-the-road
Accessed 2/3/2025
“Bear more the mark of Cain than the image and likeness of their Divine Maker”
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