Violence In Ed Gein

The real horror of this novel comes from the violence within it, based on the evil real life events of serial killer Ed Gein, and makes the violence in this novel all the more shocking, Ed Gein was raised by his mother in Wisconsin with the idea that all women are evil and corruptive, after his mother died Ed Gein had become obsessed with anatomy, the going to dig up the graves of recently deceased women, he then began killing women with similarities to his own mother, seemingly lacking any form of ego, similar to that of Patrick Bateman. Ellis goes as far as presenting strong similarities between the two in his novel, with the dark humour seen throughout American Psycho Bateman quotes Ed Gein as he explains what he thinks when he sees a pretty …show more content…
Bateman does not consider himself to be real “...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” He produces this notion again when he states “I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning” It becomes clear that these feelings indicate a distinct lack of ego, so much so that even as the novel comes to a conclusion, the audience is left being unable to distinguish between his own thoughts and