In the second half of the novel, following Bunny’s murder, the other Greek students begin to descend into varying states of paranoia. Only Henry manages to remain calm, largely because he is the one pulling the strings of many other characters in the novel. Meanwhile, Charles is on the opposite end of the spectrum; by the end of the novel, he is convinced that Henry wants to kill him, which may or may not be true. One of the compelling features of The Secret History is that it is told entirely from Richard’s perspective and, as a result, there is much about Henry that is never revealed, including whether he plans to harm Charles. Even in retrospect, Richard cannot untangle whether he himself made certain decisions of his own accord or because Henry pushed him in a particular direction. Additionally, much of the behavior exhibited toward the end of the novel is fueled by drugs and alcohol, especially in relation to Charles. Also, Richard admits that many of his memories are foggy, making much of his narration unreliable. By using an unreliable narrator to tell her story, Donna Tartt recreates in the reader a similar condition to the one her characters are experiencing—one of uncertainty, paranoia, and vulnerability. By the end of novel, though certain facts are set in stone, many others are left open to interpretation. Like Henry, then, Tartt knows how to manipulate her readers, and she leaves just enough open-ended questions to create a feverish, paranoid reading experience.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Manipulation and Paranoia ThemeTracker
Manipulation and Paranoia Quotes in The Secret History
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
The Greeks, you know, really weren’t very different from us. They were a very formal people, extraordinarily civilized, rather repressed. And yet they were frequently swept away en masse by the wildest enthusiasm—dancing, frenzies, slaughter, visions—which for us, I suppose would seem clinical madness, irreversible. Yet the Greeks—some of them, anyway—could go in and out of it as they pleased [. . .] The revelers were apparently hurled back into a non-rational, pre-intellectual state, where the personality was replaced by something completely different – and by ‘different’ I mean something to all appearances not mortal. Inhuman.
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?
Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. “Should I do what is necessary?”
To my surprise, Julian took both Henry’s hands in his own. “You should only, ever, do what is necessary,” he said.
The chronological sorting of memories in an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a sharp, delightful focus. It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off [. . .] but it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
And the horrible thing was, somehow, that I did know. “You killed somebody,” I said, “didn’t you?”
“Good for you,” he said. “You’re just as smart as I thought you were. I knew you’d figure it out, sooner or later, that’s what I’ve told the others all along.”
Things started to come back. I looked down at my hand and saw it was covered in with blood, and worse than blood. Then Charles stepped forward and knelt at something at my feet, and I bent down, too, and saw that it was a man. He was dead. He was about forty years old and he had on a yellow plaid shirt—you know those woolen shirts they wear up here—and his neck was broken, and, unpleasant to say, his brains were all over his face. Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses.
Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even to assert a kind of spurious decency. “Basically I am a very good person.” This from the latest serial killer—destined for the chair, they say—who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers.
You see, then, how quick it was. And it is impossible to slow down this film, to examine individual frames. I see now what I saw then, flashing by with the swift, deceptive ease of an accident: shower of gravel, wind-milling arms, a hand that claws at a branch and misses. A barrage of frightened crows explodes from the underbrush, cawing and dark against the sky. Cut to Henry stepping back from the edge. Then the film flaps up in the projector and the screen goes black. Consummatum est.
Henry took a sip of his tea. “How,” he said, “can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?”
Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for me to do it but he couldn’t be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. I’ll tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right book, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas.
I had always thought Henry’s coldness essential, to the marrow, and Julian’s only a veneer for what was, at bottom, a warm, kind-hearted nature. But the twinkle in Julian’s eye as I looked at him now, was mechanical and dead. It was as if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
