‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’: The self and late capitalism in Amis’s Money and Ellis’s American Psycho

Dang, Trang

doi:10.24384/000526

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‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’: The self and late capitalism in Amis’s Money and Ellis’s American Psycho

Abstract

This dissertation examines two novels: Money (1984) by Martin Amis and American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis. Written at the peak of the Reagan-Thatcher era, both feature central characters: Money’s John Self and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman whose wealthy lives are wholly occupied with material excess, alcoholism, drugs and pornography. As the Reagan-Thatcher epoch lied within the postmodern period and thus witnessed the emergence of multinational capitalism and its consequences, this dissertation argues that both novels are sites of social and political critique, offering a vision as to what extent and in what ways late capitalism shapes and influences the characters’ senses of self. While analysing the rhetoric of postmodern satire employed in the two books and a wide range of postmodern theoretical perspectives, it also uses Marx’s theory of alienation as its groundwork and Baudrillard and Jameson’s postmodern theories its main methodological approaches, to discuss the characterisations of Self and Bateman and their interconnection with the world they live in. This dissertation aims to arrive at three goals: first, to demonstrate how the formations of Self and Bateman’s identities reflect the ideology of late capitalism; second, to point out the impacts of their fragmented identities on themselves and their relationships with others in their public and private lives; third, to draw a conclusion on the causes of self-destruction in Money, and social destruction in American Psycho.