American Psycho: Similes 10 key examples

Patrick attempts to guess what someone is thinking about him—something that often happens in the novel. The simile, that Nicki looked at the colorful floor "as if it had some kind of answer," shows that Patrick assumes that Nicki actively seeks a way out of her relationship. Patrick assigns quite a bit of agency to the nonverbal Nicki; from only a look at the carpet, Patrick concocts a belief that Nicki is unsatisfied with her life. But as usual for when Patrick meets a woman, he eventually comes to the conclusion that she is flirting with him. The simile, in which Patrick believes that Nicki imagines liberation, quickly moves aside for Patrick's next selfish thought.

Armstrong's sun-dried tomato brioche, as Patrick seems to suddenly realize, "looks like a sponge drenched in blood." (It seems the brioche has too much sun-dried tomato on it.) Patrick's narration indicates that he subconsciously connects the appearance of the brioche with the bloody sponge—and then repeats it, in italics, to show him realizing with a horrific thrill that he even had the thought. Clearly, the power of this simile is that it shows how familiar he is with bloody sponges. This is one of the first overt indications that Patrick is a gruesome murderer before any actual attacks are seen in the novel. Patrick's first-person narration shows the reader his homicidal habits before they actually occur, through the fleeting connections seemingly made by his subconscious mind. 

Patrick screams "like a banshee" while his coat flies behind him "like some kind of cape." Both of these similes are instructive to Patrick's sociopathic state of mind. He emulates the banshee, the Celtic mythical creature that screams to portend death, imagining himself as a morbid supernatural being. But at the same time, imagining wearing a cape, he thinks of himself as some kind of superhero or royalty. These similes show that, after murdering a man and his dog for fun, Patrick thinks of himself as an arcane, terrifying specter of death, but also someone still worthy of admiration.

This scene is the first methodical, planned murder shown in the novel. Patrick describes his movements in terrible detail. The simile, "holding [the axe] as if it's a baseball bat," makes the attack seem disturbingly easy and simple. The comparison to a sport played or watched by many readers turns a brutal murder into a familiar, accessible motion. Patrick himself notes in the final chapter of the novel that baseball is his favorite sport. The reference to baseball is an example of Patrick as the "American psycho," as Ellis intended Bateman to represent American society and culture turned evil. More so, though, this simile shows how trivially Patrick describes murder. To him, killing is merely a repetitive motion—like a baseball swing—that one hones as part of the larger game. 

Immediately after Kimball leaves, Patrick descends into a panic, which feels "like a billion insects screaming, pounds of bacon sizzling, a vast emptiness." This is a common refrain for Patrick: in a conversation he can maintain calm, even if he gets sweaty and shaky; but when he has to deal with the consequences of his actions he loses his cool. The terrible buzzing shows that Patrick's anxiety manifests as an awareness of chaos, the white noise in his brain representing the randomness of life and death. Patrick, increasingly deranged and guilty, finds this randomness to be horrifying.

Both detective and subject agree here that "the earth just opens up and swallows people." In other words, Patrick and Kimball both think that death, even murder, is not really the fault of other people, because the Earth just sometimes makes people "disappear." The personification makes this especially powerful: Patrick's phrasing proposes that the Earth actively chooses which people live and die, which implicitly would exonerate anyone who killed Paul Owen. 

This personification of the Earth plays off of a simile later in the chapter, in which Patrick compares himself to an astronaut:

Moving him toward the door, my legs wobbly, astronaut-like, leading him out of the office, though I’m empty, devoid of feeling, I still sense—without deluding myself—that I’ve accomplished something and then, anticlimactically, we talk for a few minutes more about razor-burn balms and tattersall shirts.

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Patrick is so anxious, drugged, and scared that he can hardly stand up, as if feeling the effects of low gravity like an astronaut. In comparing himself to an astronaut, Patrick describes his jittery feeling as something like being in space—as being separated from the Earth. But despite his fearful reaction, Patrick knows that he has "accomplished something": Kimball concluded that Patrick was innocent after their interrogation. In the context of the personification of the Earth earlier in the chapter, Patrick's astronaut legs imply that, having been found innocent, he feels separated from the consequences of life and death. 

Evelyn accepts "like a spider"—what does Patrick mean by this? Patrick says that he is in a "stupor" earlier in this chapter, which certainly comes through here: it is not at all clear what Patrick means in comparing Evelyn to a spider. Patrick does not discuss spiders anywhere else in the book, and for all of Patrick's anxieties and irregular behaviors, he never shows any particular aversion or affection to bugs. (Certainly one can imagine there are not many bugs in Patrick's sterile, high-rise apartment.)

Patrick might be implying that he is some kind of prey caught in a web, the fly to Evelyn's spider, that she is somehow trapping him in the trip to the Hamptons. But Patrick is the one that suggests the trip to her, and anyway, this feeling would be totally incongruous with Patrick's usual controlling feelings toward Evelyn and toward women in general. Perhaps the best interpretation is that Patrick is simply entirely deranged in this moment: his "mask of sanity" has slipped so much that he can no longer narrate the book coherently. At this point in the novel, Patrick's mental state has bled into the prose, this simile representing Patrick's inability to accurately interpret his surroundings.

"A few shots of Vodka," along with a lot of money, relaxes Christie "like a tranquilizer." Patrick is addicted to tranquilizers, especially Xanax, so he uses this simile from personal experience. He is trying to recreate his own dubious sense of calm in Christie through different means. The simile also clarifies the kind of relaxation that Patrick wants from Christie. He doesn't want her to be relaxed as if she were in a safe place where she is comfortable; instead, he wants her relaxed as if she were on a tranquilizer, unaware, vulnerable, and open to persuasion.

Luis sneaks up on Patrick "like a smash cut," referring to the film-editing technique of using an unexpected cut, to an unexpected subject, for dramatic or sometimes comedic effect. (A famous example of a smash cut is the moment in The Shining when Danny looks down an empty hallway, which suddenly fills with blood pouring from the elevator.) A "jump zoom," a much less common term, is essentially the same thing, with a sudden zoom instead of a cut. 

Patrick uses the term to describe how shocked he is at Luis's sudden appearance. This is one of a series of similes near the end of the novel in which Patrick becomes increasingly convinced that his life is "like a movie." This filmic delusion allows him to further separate himself—and the reader—from his actions. He comes to think that the people around him are only characters, and that the events of his life are not real. Still, though, Luis's appearance clearly frustrates Patrick immensely, and he desperately craves drugs to calm down. There is a tension between Patrick's belief that the events around him are fictitious and the unavoidable bodily truth of Patrick's feelings of panic and addiction. This tension, between Patrick's perception and sensation, will be the primary conflict for the remainder of the book.

Patrick gets tackled and his adrenaline feels "like gasoline is coursing through his veins instead of blood." The third-person narration shows increasingly unbelievable events as Patrick separates himself from his own actions in some kind of wild hallucination. Here, through the gasoline in his veins, he imagines himself as some kind of machine, free from bodily danger. He describes this feeling as an "infection," something that Patrick would usually hate, with his extreme health anxiety. But, separated by the third-person narration, his body becomes increasingly like an automaton. In this moment, Patrick is so infected by drugs and rage that he becomes untethered from reality, untethered even from first-person existence, living in a body that runs on gasoline.