The Secret History: Unreliable Narration from an Aesthetic Idealist

The Secret History: Unreliable Narration from an Aesthetic Idealist

Investigating the concept of an “unreliable narrator” in Donna Tartt’s dark academia novel The Secret History, my essay argues that without Richard Papen as the narrator of this spine-chilling novel, the story line could not have been stitched together with such seductive allure. Papen begins his narration in chapter one by presenting the concept of “the fatal flaw” that lurks in the depths of all of us, and his is this: “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (Tartt 7). Papen, who attends Hampden College in Vermont and studies Greek with a small elitist group of students, crafts a carefully constructed and romanticized world to successfully lull both the readers and himself into a state of false tranquility in the face of stone cold murder. I begin by outlining the psychological workings of Papen, and then exemplify how this directly manipulates the reader’s comprehension of the plotline throughout various points in the novel. I particularly pay close attention to the points where light is shed on the two murder scenes- both Bunny’s murder and the farmer’s murder as a result of the Bacchanal- so as to illustrate how “[Richard’s] narration is so precise and fluent that reading it becomes pleasurable in the way that watching a complicated engine with lots of finely machined parts operate at high speed can be pleasurable” (Lackey 93). Through the close reading analysis that I do in this essay to slowly bring attention to the deception of Papen’s words, we truly begin to understand how terrifying Tartt’s novel really is.