"Uh, I'm a pretty sick guy"

This paper examines how dialogue in Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) serves to project the identity of its controversial protagonist Patrick Bateman. A com- parison with the dialogue in Mary Harron's film adaptation (2000) further highlights the importance of dialogue for characterisation by analysing how changes in Bateman's conversational behaviour on screen result in a different interpretation of the character. A pragmastylistic analysis reveals that dialogues are characterised by a strong discrepancy between their form and their content. While Conversation Analysis exposes few irregu- larities in the turn-taking structure of the dialogues, a Gricean pragmatic analysis con- f irms the impression that the content of the dialogues is often vapid – the participants fail to establish a meaningful connection with one another through a cooperative exchange of information. Bateman tries to disrupt the vapid interaction by confessing ever more openly to his killing sprees in a desperate attempt to establish some genuine contact. However, as the dialogues maintain the semblance of conversation, his shocking con- fessions go completely unnoticed. A scene-based analysis of the film, complete with a multimodal transcript, provides an insight into how the reduction of Bateman's deviances significantly alters his characterisation.