The Secret History

by

Donna Tartt

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The Human Capacity for Violence Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
The Human Capacity for Violence Theme Icon
Intellectual Pursuits and Reasonability   Theme Icon
Guilt Theme Icon
Manipulation and Paranoia Theme Icon
Beauty and Terror Theme Icon
Class and Identity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Secret History, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Capacity for Violence Theme Icon

There are two murders at the center of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The first is a random act of violence perpetrated by four college students while in a crazed state. The second is a premeditated murder carried out by those same students, this time with Richard Papen at their side. On the surface, it seems shocking and unexpected that such violence could be carried out by these students. Several of them are from wealthy backgrounds, they are all exceptional students, and none of them have a criminal record. However, as the novel develops, Tartt interrogates and eventually deconstructs these identity markers. She strips away the assumed link between intelligence, wealth, and morality to reveal a group of people who are surprisingly capable of heinous acts of violence. Perhaps the most shocking revelation of the novel is that Henry, the charismatic leader of the group (who is also from the most prestigious background), borders on psychopathy. In a climactic moment, he tells Richard that he enjoys killing and feels freer than he ever has before. Although the other Greek students are more remorseful than Henry, they are still culpable for committing morally reprehensible acts. What this reveals is that even an average person like Richard is capable of committing violent acts under the right circumstances. Though the thought of personally engaging in acts of extreme violence seems impossible to most people, The Secret History sets forth the unsettling idea that we are much more capable of committing such acts than we might realize.

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The Human Capacity for Violence ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of The Human Capacity for Violence appears in each chapter of The Secret History. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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The Human Capacity for Violence Quotes in The Secret History

Below you will find the important quotes in The Secret History related to the theme of The Human Capacity for Violence.
Prologue Quotes

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Bunny (Edmund Corcoran)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Julian Morrow (speaker), Richard Papen
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:

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?

Related Characters: Julian Morrow (speaker), Richard Papen , Bunny (Edmund Corcoran)
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2  Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Henry Winter (speaker), Julian Morrow (speaker), Richard Papen
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. “Live forever,” he says.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Julian Morrow (speaker)
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry’s ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter , Bunny (Edmund Corcoran) , Francis Abernathy
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon?

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker)
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter (speaker), Charles Macauley , Camilla Macauley , Francis Abernathy , Julian Morrow
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Henry Winter (speaker), Richard Papen
Page Number: 169
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”

The woods were silent, not a sound.

Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter (speaker), Bunny (Edmund Corcoran) (speaker)
Page Number: 269
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Bunny (Edmund Corcoran)
Page Number: 275
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter , Bunny (Edmund Corcoran)
Page Number: 276
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

His gaze—helpless, wild—hit me like a blackjack. Suddenly, and for the first time, really, I was struck by the bitter, irrevocable truth of it; the evil of what we had done. It was like running full speed into a brick wall. I let go of his collar, feeling completely helpless. I wanted to die. “Oh, God,” I mumbled, “God help me, I’m sorry—”

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter , Francis Abernathy , Mr. Corcoran , Sophie Dearbold
Page Number: 388
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

“Are you happy here?” I said at last.

He considered this for a moment. “Not particularly,” he said. “But you’re not very happy where you are, either.”

Related Characters: Richard Papen (speaker), Henry Winter (speaker), Bunny (Edmund Corcoran)
Related Symbols: The Museum Exhibit
Page Number: 559
Explanation and Analysis: