The Secret History question

The Secret History by Donna Tartt was, in all honesty, a long read. After months and months of picking it up and putting it back down, it finally came to an end. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it—I did—but I realized by the end that so much had occurred that I could read it hundreds of times and never fully grasp the true story. It’s possible this is because Richard is an unreliable narrator, sharing idealized and inaccurate depictions through the lens of a liar.

Then Richard leaves us with a dream, showing Henry sitting in an academic building surrounded by men smoking pipes in a city caught between the ravages of war and modernization. Richard asks Henry if he’s happy, and his response is: “Not particularly, but you’re not very happy where you are either.” I sat for almost an hour after putting this book down debating what it all meant—a dream that appears to mean little to nothing, leaving readers with more questions than answers. What is this city? Why does Henry think he needs a passport? What did Richard mean by “are you happy here?” And what appointment does Henry have to leave so abruptly for?

This was about the time I realized that his final one-on-one interaction with Henry completely juxtaposes the earlier scene in his garden. While tending to his roses, Henry tells Richard that after murdering a man, he finally feels free—like he can do anything. Henry quite literally uses the word immobilized to describe his life prior to committing murder. Now, in Richard’s dream, he is effectively trapped in every sense of the word: trapped in time between old and new, trapped between destruction and construction, and trapped because of his passport dilemma. I would argue he is right back to being immobilized.

The city that Richard describes walking through is what really stuck with me. I choose to believe that, regardless of whether this dream is spiritual or psychological, the city represents Henry’s memory forever trapped in a reality that no longer exists, but is continually reconstructed on top of. Richard’s relationships with the group will never be mended, and it is his time to build new ones on top of the unsettled ground of what once existed. However, Henry’s memory remains trapped and unchanged from his last moments on earth.

The hardest thing for me to understand about this book was the fact that Henry did decide to kill himself. Why? In all honesty, I think they could have found a way to get out of their situation. Regardless, his decision seemed rash and unpredictable, as it seems there was a strong possibility that Charles could just as easily have turned on Camilla or Francis in the time following Henry’s death. As Francis tells Richard earlier in the book, Charles was afraid of Henry; I suppose Charles entering the situation with a weapon effectively closes this narrative.

While this ending is something I will continue to ponder, Henry’s death seems to me a clear showcase that his new reality is no longer one he has to think critically about in order to enjoy it. By the end, when Richard even takes the time to confront him in the garden, we see that Henry understands his position is slipping in the group. They begin to question his decisions and the reasons for their situation. I truly think that this was the moment when Henry leaves to go change the registration of his vehicle into Richard’s name. This, however, would imply that Henry was potentially suicidal or anticipating his death, and while I wish this weren’t true, I think his anticipation and acceptance that all that is beautiful in life must come to an end drove him to make these changes. He is left becoming the martyr in a story where everyone immediately forgets his flaws.

The final conversation, whether real or just a dream, makes me wonder if Henry’s response to “are you happy here” has a deeper meaning. Potentially, “here” can be interpreted as his decision to end his life. However, as Henry so meticulously points out, his decision not to live had no greater impact than Richard’s decision to live. Despite their opposing choices, one thing is true for both: “this is the only story [they] will ever be able to tell.”

While I’m not entirely sure what this all means—especially taken together—the only interpretation I can settle on is that Richard represents the romantic while Henry represents the rationalist. It’s possible that the big conclusion of this story is that one is not superior to the other. I’ll ignore some of the obvious surface flaws in my analysis and leave out the long but ever-present tangent on Camilla and Charles.