Summary
As the hypotext of Lunar Park (2005), American Psycho (1991) provides many interpretative 
keys to Bret Easton Ellis’s pseudo autobiographical work. In harmony with the playful spirit of 
postmodernism, the diegetic author behaves like the conjurers who disclose the tricks of their 
trade without destroying the essence of their magic. His universe is greatly identical to that of his 
fiction and the summaries of his preceding books duplicate the same text, thereby questioning 
the nature of creation. #is paper starts by bringing to light Ellis’s conjuring tricks, before 
considering the relevance of a commodified persona in the context of a fin de siècle dominated by 
the emblematic figure of the yuppie as a grotesque dandy. #e last part uses the final image of 
American Psycho and its transparent reference to one of Magritte’s most famous paintings in order 
to draw a parallel between Ellis’s creative process and the painter’s.
Keywords:  Ellis, Magritte, autobiography, persona, commodification, trick, 
duplication, dandy, creation.
 Povzetek
Kot hipotekst Luninega parka (2005) Ameriški psiho (1991) ponuja mnoge interpretacijske 
odgovore na Ellisovo psevdoavtobiografsko delo. Diegetični avtor se v igrivem duhu 
postmodernizma vede kot čarodej, ki razodene svoje ukane, ne da bi pri tem okrnil bistva njihove 
skrivnostnosti. Pisateljev svet je domala istoveten s svetom njegove fikcije in povzetki njegovih 
prejšnjih knjig se podvajajo v istem besedilu, kar postavlja pod vprašaj samo naravo ustvarjanja.
Članek uvodoma osvetli Ellisove čarovniške prijeme, nato pa preide k bistvu komodificirane 
persone v kontekstu fin de siècla, ki ga obvladuje figura yuppija v podobi grotesknega dandyja. 
Sklepni del se pomudi ob poslednji podobi Ameriškega psiha in njeni nedvoumni navezavi na 
eno izmed Magrittovih najslavnejših slik ter izpostavi vzporednice med Ellisovim in slikarjevim 
ustvarjalnim procesom.
Ključne besede: Ellis, Magritte, avtobiografija, persona, komodifikacija, ukana, podvajanje, dandy, 
ustvarjanje.
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.5.1-2.101-112

Lunar Park,
1
 Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, starts as an autobiography coupled with metatextual 
comments on Ellis’s previous works. #e first pages include extracts from the incipits of four earlier 
novels; Bret Easton Ellis thus presents himself as the author of his latest creation. He claims he is 
now aiming at recovering his original formal simplicity, arguing that what is at stake is not only a 
literary issue. His self-criticism is ruthless; he provides summaries of his novels that prove almost 
identical and suggest that the failure of his personal life is reflected in that of his creation. Lunar 
Park starts out as a truthful autobiographical work, but veers into obvious fiction as serial killer 
Patrick Bateman, the hero of Ellis’s American Psycho,
 2
 shows up at the author’s home.
In Lunar Park Patrick Bateman appears as an avatar of Ellis’s father, but this Patrick Bateman 
(who, revealingly, appears one Halloween night [55]) does not really look like the protagonist of 
American Psycho. For the author – himself dressed up as… Bret Easton Ellis and looking very much 
like his own guest (122) – is led to recognize his hero through his physical likeness with Christian 
Bale, the actor who plays the lead in the movie adaptation. From then on, the writer progressively 
turns into a persona, and eventually becomes a mere character: “Bret Easton Ellis” may well have 
committed the horrors that fill Lunar Park, duplicating the ones of his psychopathic hero. #e 
world of concrete reality is thus greatly identical to that of the fiction, just as the summaries of the 
preceding books indefinitely reproduce the same text. Lunar Park seems to demolish the body of 
work of an author who, in every respect, fits the image of the superficial diva conveyed by the hype 
that has been surrounding him since the very beginning of his career.
It turns out that, in harmony with the playful spirit of postmodernism, the diegetic author of 
Lunar Park behaves like the conjurers who disclose the tricks of their trade without destroying 
the essence of their magic. Such manipulation partakes both of desecration and of mythical 
construction. #e words actually betray the author-persona’s avowed intention, suggesting that 
the key to the thematic concern of his latest novel lies in American Psycho, which makes up its 
hypotext. #at is why this paper will eventually use the final image of American Psycho and its 
transparent reference to one of Magritte’s most famous paintings in order to draw a parallel 
between Ellis’s creative process and the painter’s, for whom “writing is an invisible description of 
thought and painting is its visible description” (Noël 1976, 32).
3
  
 “‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself’” (LP, 3) – the very beginning of Lunar 
Park emphasizes the question of the representation of the self. #e autodiegetic narrator 
   

parallels this opening sentence with that of his debut novel (Less #an Zero, 1985), to praise 
its “stripped-down minimalism” (LP, 5) and castigate what he claims is the verbose affectation 
of the incipits of his earlier books. In quite a different context, John McGahern defines style 
as “the expression of personality through technique”
4
; it is in the very same spirit that the 
narrator states his ambition to make Lunar Park a medium whose aesthetic nature encompasses 
intimate stakes:
As anyone who had closely followed the progression of my career could glimpse—and if 
fiction inadvertently reveals a writer’s inner life—things were getting out of hand, resembling 
something that according to the New York Times had become “bizarrely complicated . . . 
bloated and trivial . . . hyped-up,” and I didn’t necessarily disagree. I wanted a return to that 
past simplicity. I was overwhelmed by my life, and those first sentences seemed reflections of 
what had gone wrong. It was time to get back to basics [...]. (LP, 5)
Lunar Park opens with what reads like pitiless self castigation. After celebrating the qualities of 
the incipit of Less #an Zero, he thus summarizes the novel: 
It detailed a wealthy, alienated, sexually ambiguous young man’s Christmas break [...] and 
all the parties he wandered through [...] and all the friends he passively watched drift into 
addiction, prostitution and vast apathy [...]. It was an indictment not only of a way of life 
I was familiar with but also [...] of the Reagan eighties [...]. (LP, 6) 
Here is an extract from the summary of his second novel: 
#e Rules of Attraction [...] detailed the sex lives of a small group of wealthy, alienated, 
sexually ambiguous students [...] during the height of the Reagan eighties. We followed 
them as they wandered from orgiastic party to orgiastic party [...]. (LP, 14)
A few pages on, American Psycho is presented as 
a novel about a young, wealthy, alienated Wall Street Yuppie named Patrick Bateman who 
also happened to be a serial killer filled with vast apathy during the height of the Reagan 
eighties. (LP, 17)
#at poorly inspired work is the fruit of the imagination of the persona, who happens to be at 
once the creator and the creature. By asserting its autobiographical quality, Lunar Park heralds 
a break with such artistic emptiness thanks to the dismissal of former recipes and the pursuit of 
formal purity.
As the plot unfolds, however, Lunar Park becomes increasingly fictional. “Bret Easton Ellis” appears 
just as outrageous as his characters and his book submits to formal conventions that only incidentally 
 Quoted from personal notes taken from a video transmission of a nationwide scholarly debate conducted in 1994 for CNED, the 
French national distance learning program.

fall within the province of artistic genius: it openly uses the well-known dramatic springs of popular 
horror and of B movies,
5
 and follows the Zeitgeist.
6
 #e author first seems to be telling about himself 
and then builds his entire narrative around a grotesque persona. All things considered he does not 
reveal much about himself; his disclosing only a few of his secrets leaves the remaining narrative 
tricks/mysteries even more impenetrable. In accordance with the postmodern perspective, he treats 
the creative process as diegetic material, seeming to forget all about the original issue. Lunar Park 
sets out to lay bare the essence of creation, and then becomes a new novel, a new item in the corpus, 
adding to the mystery and maintaining its solution out of the textual context.
Postmodernism has a lot in common with those illusionists whose trick consists in disclosing the 
ropes of their very conjuring. #e manipulation thus revealed is not exposed as deception; it is 
part and parcel of a performance that aims at creating a pleasure renewed from age-old recipes. 
#e audience is first invited to attend a mysterious trick, performed in a traditional way; they will 
derive pleasure in taking part in the trick by understanding its technical facets. Since that laying 
bare is usually executed in playful manner, such pleasure rests on both the successful outcome 
of an intellectual process and the purely aesthetic appreciation of the artistic performance that 
made it possible. In other words, an artist who discloses his technical secrets remains a true artist, 
whose know-how goes beyond the mere accomplishment of a perfectly coded trick. #e belief of 
the audience switches from the superstitious type (i.e. the belief in the artist’s all powerful creative 
power) to the educated admiration of the perfect mastery of the codes brought to light. From 
a creator, the artist becomes a manipulator: one marvels at his ability to appropriate traditional 
techniques in order to make a truly personal creation. In short, one admires his style.
Let us for instance consider the classic circus clown act which consists of a succession of identical 
conjuring tricks where bottles seem to disappear in empty cylinders. After a while, simulating 
clumsiness, the artists let their legerdemains show through, letting the audience understand their 
clever technique, but thereby ending the magic of the moment. In the course of the number 
the audience’s reaction usually starts with laughter at the comic situation whose workings they 
do not understand, then at themselves when realizing the trick of which they have been the 
jubilant butt. Laughter may then focus on the clowns, who keep performing the same sleight of 
hand as though the audience were still unaware of the artists’ handlings. In the end, the clowns 
slightly modify their legerdemain, which can obviously no longer be explained by the technique 
they had let the spectators discover. #e new technique will be kept mysterious; once more the 
audience laugh at themselves, for having been fooled anew by characters whose expertise they 
had underestimated. 
 .
  .

#e iconoclastic revelation of the repetitive technical foundations of an artistic creation seems 
intended to destroy the quasi divine nature that might otherwise be attributed to it.
7
 In major 
artistic modes of expression the impact of that revelation is twofold: it denotes the rejection of the 
sacralization of the creative process while contributing to building the mythical aura of the latter, 
which is shown to express the spirit of a unique conscience. T rue to the spirit of postmodernism, 
Lunar Park unveils some of its compositional conventions so as to question the validity of the 
choices and of the appropriateness of those conventions. It does away with the sacred aura of 
the novel in the context of the authorial corpus (and, by the same token, the banality of the 
whole corpus), while making the latter the cornerstone of the psychology of “Bret Easton Ellis.” 
#e critical process called for by the relation between the two texts and merely initiated by the 
narrator at the beginning of Lunar Park is bound to be continued by the reader. For the shifting 
status of the implied author from critic to fictitious character calls to mind that, a contrario, the 
ignorant yuppie of American Psycho readily used the rhetoric of a music critic (Bateman’s lengthy, 
empty presentation of the band Genesis covers the whole eponymous chapter pp. 128-131 and 
concludes with the stereotyped “Genesis is still the best, most exciting band to come out of 
England in the 1980s.” [p. 131]). #e musical culture of “Bret Easton Ellis” is quite reliable and 
expressed in much more personal fashion; his critical blindness towards his own text, however, 
still reflects his character’s verbiage: 
T eenage Pussy [his next novel] would contain endless episodes of girls storming out of 
rooms in high-rise condos and the transcripts of cell phone conversations fraught with 
tension […]. Chapters were titled “#e Facial,” “#e Silicone Queen” […] #e book was 
all about the hard sell […] but it was also going to be poignant and quietly devastating 
and put every other book written by my generation to shame.” (LP, 102, 105)
#e author-narrator as critic is unable to realize that the text he is currently working on is nothing 
but a pornographic production. #is denotes the uselessness of the very notion of criticism, as 
well as that of the persona’s own narrative choices, for “Bret Easton Ellis” does not conceive that 
authorial paternity in no way conveys any control over the reception of his creation. In this case 
the author even finds himself possessed by his creation, up to the point when he hires a team of 
exorcists,
8
 thereby becoming a character submitted to the perverse logic of the psychopathic hero 
of American Psycho.
 At the diegetic time of American Psycho the musical “Les Misérables” was a huge success in Broadway. 
Bateman and all his Yuppie acquaintances were ecstatic; the posters and the merchandising were 
omnipresent and the music score was monopolizing the radio stations. Without any qualms, 
the bombastic show reified poverty into a highly lucrative, kitsch commodity, exploiting Hugo’s 
revolutionary spirit to consolidate the values of dominant capitalistic conformism. 
 .

Belonging to the real world, Manhattan is supposed to compose the nonfictional counterpart of 
the setting of the musical. However, the streets are swarming with bums and homeless people 
and look surprisingly like Hugo’s famed shady Cour des Miracles; this New York microcosm 
duplicates that of “Les Misérables,” thereby making up a play within the play in which the two 
spectacles prove identical. #e society’s rejects are part and parcel of that setting and are treated 
like props by the Yuppies, who keep using them for their amusement. In its absurdist way the 
New York pageant, costumed by the greatest fashion designers, exemplifies the soundness of 
the founding Shakespearean concept – “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women 
merely players” (As You like It, act 2, sc. 7).
9
 Yet the Shakespearean world picture postulates a 
divine transcendence which sets the individual within the frame of a natural order. In a perverse 
evolution, the social Darwinism of the Reagan years substitutes the order of things for the order 
of objects. #e nature of that transformation is utterly narcissistic; an expensive, fashionable 
object has become the only way for the individual to get not only a sense of identity through the 
recognition of his peers, but also an ontological sense of his existence. Baudrillard alludes to the 
perverse consequences of the compulsive acquisition of such commodities: 
Its [the object’s] absolute singularity […] arises from the fact of being possessed by me 
– and this allows me, in turn, to recognize myself in the object as an absolutely singular 
being. #is is a grandiose tautology, but one that gives the relationship to objects all its 
density – its absurd facility, and the illusory but intense gratification it supplies. […] 
What is more, […] the relationship with objects has one characteristic that can never be 
found in the intersubjective realm: no object ever opposes the extension of the process of  
narcissistic projection to an unlimited number of other objects; on the contrary, the object 
imposes that very tendency, thereby contributing to the creation of a total environment, 
to that totalization of images of the self that is the basis of the miracle of collecting. For 
what you really collect is always yourself. (Baudrillard 1996, 90–1)
Purchasing different objects amounts to endlessly reiterating the identical pattern of buying the 
very same object, in the vain subconscious attempt at building up a unified sense of the self. In the 
consumerist environment of American Psycho, this attitude commodifies the experience of existence 
to the point of substituting the individual for his status symbols and, ultimately, of transforming 
the others into expendable objects devoid of any individuality. In this case the tautology alluded to 
by Baudrillard also lies in the fact that, by duplicating the act of always purchasing the same object 
(i.e. oneself), the individual will duplicate himself to the point of becoming one with the other 
objects (i.e. the others) he so desperately needs to differentiate himself from. 
Mammon does not prove to be a structuring deity; its devotees find themselves enslaved by 
the fickle dictatorship of conspicuous consumption. Unlike the cultured, tasteful dandy, whose 
wish was “creating oneself afresh each day as a work of art” (Calloway 1997, 51), the Yuppie is a 
frivolous character defined by his very frivolity. #e refinement of the top executives of American 
Psycho is mostly limited to brand awareness. #ey are grotesque dandies, psychopathic conformists 


– human oxymora seeking to assert their distinctive identity by subscribing to commonplaces. 
Despite appearances, their refinement is mere mimicry, quite a far cry from the dilettantes they 
call to mind and whose seemingly shallow behavior was often akin to rebellion:
#e dandy-aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle period above all honed their senses and cultivated 
the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness their 
greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies toward nurturing a cult of 
aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste, that lies beyond mere 
considerations of fashion, and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional 
canons of morality. (Calloway 1997, 34)
#eir obsessive quest for difference being totally conventional, the affluent characters of American 
Psycho end up looking like mirror reflections of each other—so perfect that the Yuppies regularly 
fail to recognize one another in public places, which have become so many halls of mirrors:
“What in the fuck is Morrison wearing?” Preston asks himself. “Is that really a glen-plaid 
suit with a checkered shirt?” 
“#at’s not Morrison,” Price says. 
“Who is it then?” Preston asks, taking his glasses off again. 
“#at’s Paul Owen,” Price says. 
“#at’s not Paul Owen,” I say. “Paul Owen’s on the other side of the bar. Over there.” 
Owen stands at the bar wearing a double-breasted wool suit. (35)
Owen has mistaken me for Marcus Halberstam. (86)
#ese executives are Dorian Grays of the next fin de siècle, concerned only with the present 
and totally dedicated to the cult of youth,
10
 in a state of euphoria that Barthes analyzed in #e 
Fashion System. Hedonist though it was, Dorian’s quest was tinged with spirituality, expressed 
a reaction to the conformism of his times and yearned for sublimity hic et nunc: “Fashion, by 
which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own 
way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty […].” (106) As for Manhattan’s 
stylish business people, they are content with sheepishly following the trend. As “a device that 
foregrounds the discursive foundations upon which meaning depends” (Annesley
 
1998, 85), 
intertextuality is part and parcel of all literary creation and constantly enriches our apprehension 
of any given novel. In many ways, “Ellis’s transtextual focus” (Annesley
 
1998, 84) in American 
Psycho reflects #e Picture of Dorian Gray and foretells the problematics of duplication that 
informs the very nature of Lunar Park. Among the manifold echoes, let us note the example of 
Bateman’s apartment, full of the most expensive, ultra modern equipment, denoting the owner’s 
total lack of artistic taste and composing a grotesque reproduction of the exquisite home of a 
highly cultured Dorian. Here is the telltale beginning of Bateman’s description:


this is what the living room of my apartment looks like: Over the white marble and granite 
gas-log fireplace hangs an original David Onica. It’s a six-foot-by-four-foot portrait of a 
naked woman, mostly done in muted grays and olives, sitting on a chaise longue watching 
MTV , the backdrop a Martian landscape, a gleaming mauve desert scattered with dead, 
gutted fish, smashed plates rising like a sunburst above the woman’s yellow head, and the 
whole thing is framed in black aluminum steel. #e painting overlooks a long white down-
filled sofa and a thirty-inch digital TV set from T oshiba; it’s a high-contrast highly defined 
model plus it has a four-corner video stand with a high-tech tube combination from NEC 
with a picture-in-picture digital effects system (plus freeze-frame) […]. (23, 24)
In itself, the remarkable length of the description of the apartment (over four pages) is 
reminiscent of the exhaustive evocation of Dorian’s precious fads right at the center of Wilde’s 
novel: intertextuality does not raise only the question of subject matter, but also that of form.
11
Whatever their topics of conversation, Bateman’s colleagues adopt the stereotyped rhetoric of 
mainstream opinion, conveyed notably by fashion(able) magazines, and naturally endorse their 
intrinsic values. #at doxa holds the final victory of an eternal, tyrannical present, for “Fashion 
experiences itself as a right, the natural right of the present over the past; defined by its very 
infidelity, Fashion nevertheless lives in a world that it wants and sees ideally stable, totally filled 
with conformist outlooks.”
12
 Bateman lives in a purely materialistic universe where each object 
becomes an image of oneself and where, logically, the individual sees himself everywhere. #e 
characters of American Psycho are described minutely and obsessively, but their depiction is 
exclusively limited to their clothes: 
He’s wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill 
Blass and cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m wearing a lightweight linen 
suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted silk tie, all by Valentino Couture, and 
perforated cap-toe leather shoes by Allen-Edmonds. Once inside Harry’s we spot David 
Van Patten and Craig McDermott at a table up front. Van Patten is wearing a double-
breasted wool and silk sport coat, button-fly wool and silk trousers with inverted pleats 
by Mario Valentino, a cotton shirt by Gitman Brothers, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass 
and leather shoes from Brooks Brothers. McDermott is wearing a woven-linen suit with 
pleated trousers, a button-down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph 
Abboud and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards. (AP, 29)
Annesley labels Ellis’s works as “blank fiction,” where “the vision offered is a gloomy one. 
Contemporary culture is dominated by commodification, a process which leads, it seems, 


to freezing, objectification and in many cases death.” (1998, 53) As the preceding quotation 
from American Psycho exemplifies, the individual is indeed totally reified in his appearance of 
the moment.
13
 Nineteenth century aesthetes had already been through a similar experience: 
“Striving to become an art object, the dandy dehumanizes himself in order to make his social 
spectacle” (Garelick 1998, 66). #at alienation is of a deadly essence; in the words of Barthes, 
“that absolute, dogmatic and vengeful present when fashion prevails” results from “the murder it 
commits on its own past” (Barthes 1967, 304).
14
 #at metaphoric murder heralds the ultimate 
victory of the pleasure instinct, and Bateman ends up killing because of his inability to grasp the 
metaphorical nature of the discourse that molds him.
 Bateman’s confusion makes his narration unreliable; the facts may not always be told from 
psychotic fantasies, for the character can distinguish neither desire from reality nor physical 
objects from mental images. #at is why his final vision at the end of the novel takes on exemplary 
value. He finds himself in a bar, delirious, and thus concludes his story:
above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in 
letters that match the drapes’ colors are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. (AP, 384)
Let us note that the sign matches the drapes, which suits Bateman’s aesthetic tastes, and makes it 
appear totally normal: it is an integral part of the setting. #e inscription is a transparent allusion 
to Magritte’s emblematic painting, displaying “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”), but 
whose title is actually “La trahison des images” (“the betrayal of images”).
15
 Draguet says that at 
that moment, “Magritte does not place himself in the vein of painting. He has entered that of 
the image, which is resolutely mental.”
 
(Draguet 2003, 84)
16
Bateman prides himself on owning works of art, but to him they are ordinary objects of which he 
knows only the market value; as for the sign, it is a real ordinary object, but that echoes a work of 
art. Just as the painting, it suggests that appearances are too subversive to be trusted. Such a sign 
[“#is is not an exit”], placed above a door, may a priori indicate only an exit; the final surprise 
rests on the strict appropriateness of the linguistic sign to a situation whose abnormality seems 
created only by the message. Which is the very essence of Magritte’s avowed intention: just as the 
representation of an object is not that object, the sign may not be an exit, since it is a sign. In that 
 


case, Bateman’s deviant vision (it is very hard to imagine such an indication in a bar) becomes 
the expression of common sense. 
Draguet states that, in “the betrayal of images,” “what is said not to be a pipe does not find any 
other alternative formulation (‘If it is not a pipe, what is it, then?’)” (84).
17
 At a strictly literal 
level “#is,” as the grammatical subject of “#is is not an exit,” is definitely not an exit. Likewise, 
that story, made up of words, and of which “#is” constitutes a synecdoche, is nothing but a 
mental spectacle based on the play on the possible and the real. Eventually this inscription, 
which composes the literal exit of the book and which displays its nature as a linguistic sign, 
reminds the reader that the magic of writing is only an illusion – i.e., an image.
Such illusion is inherent to literature, which fosters mental images prompted only by the 
artist, but whose interpretation is left to the reader alone, who reflects himself in his subjective 
apprehension.
Besides, on the very diegetic plane, Bateman may well be a young man with a perverted 
imagination who fantasizes his murders – and who might even not be Patrick Bateman
18
 (to 
rephrase Draguet, “but what is he, then?”).
About another Magritte painting, Noël points out:
As soon as the object of “Les Vacances de Hegel” has become ambiguous enough to 
function no longer in relation to the things that make it up, but to the contradiction in 
those things that it solves, it has become a mental object, which materializes nothing else 
than Magritte’s thoughts.
 
(22)
19
“THIS IS NOT AN EXIT” may thus be considered as the reification of Bateman’s thought process. 
It turns out, however, that the (no) exit sign composes the mirror image of the entrance sign that 
opens the novel (which also appears in capital letters): 
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the 
side of the Chemical bank near the corner of Eleventh and First (AP, 3)
Obviously, that message does not belong to the tangible world, and it is very unlikely that it could 
originate from an ignorant Bateman, living only in the present, probably unable to recollect 
literary references, and even less able to ever equal Dante’s poetic genius.
 “

#e mirror structure of AP is aptly and artificially conveyed by the presence of the two signs 
studied above, which denotes that of artistic creation in general, as well as its irreducible capacity 
to express the coherence of the universe. Such coherence is not necessarily reassuring; in this 
case, the (no) exit of American Psycho opens up on Lunar Park, whose near-homonymy with 
Luna Park puts it under the influence of the moon, between festival and madness, and which 
duplicates Bateman’s psychotic universe. 
At the same time, the shallow yet painstaking descriptions of characters and settings in American 
Psycho underline the fundamental sameness of individuals and of their environments, showing 
obvious similarities with Warhol’s series of (quasi) identical icons of lowbrow, popular culture. 
Ellis’s style, especially in American Psycho, partakes of minimalism, which sets him in tune with 
some of the characteristic aspects of pop art. Rebein notes that in 
literary minimalism […] there was the feeling that what the old-fashioned realists had 
called “milieu” had been replaced by brand names and other “surface details” that clearly 
came not from the individual artist but from a “nonartistic source”—the world of the 
television sitcom and the shopping mall, for example. (33)
More importantly, Ellis’s open use of reproduction calls to mind the tricks of Warhol the egocentric, 
which often liken his talent to that of a photocopying machine, blurring the distinction between 
person and persona: “Warhol imagined that he was a machine, suggesting that he felt his life as 
well as his art was manufactured” (Kuspit 2004, 151).
As appears in the two novels under scrutiny, Ellis’s aesthetic universe is the one of repetition of 
the identical, in an ambiguous relation between introspection and narcissistic reflection, between 
acknowledged artistic influence [debt?] and plagiarism. Just like Warhol, the author of Lunar 
Park has become “a social illusion – a shallow image, a more or less theatrical surface.” (Kuspit 
2004, 152) #e other side of that image is Bret Easton Ellis, who builds up in an epitext written 
by others and which reads like his novels. His pathetic image might well become emblematic of 
what Kuspit calls the end of art.