The Secret History Donna Tartt

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“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt is told from the perspective of Richard Papen. He lives a bleak, boring life in a small town called Plano, located in California. Richard hates where he lives, he hates his college, and he doesn’t like what he is studying. He also has a really unpleasant relationship with his family. This is before he was accepted, with a lot of financial aid, into a small, liberal arts college in Vermont, called Hampden College. When Richard arrives at Hampden College, he meets with his advisor. Richard mentions that he wants to continue studying Greek because it was the only subject at his old school that he actually enjoyed and excelled at. His advisor says not to bother try get into the Greek class because the professor …show more content…

He starts to act like he has more money than he really does. He also uses your typical Californian stereotypes such as Hollywood, surfing and all these other things associated with being a Californian to create an image of what his life was like before he arrived at Hampden College. Eventually, Richard is accepted by the group. With that he learns many of their secrets. He accidentally discovers that Henry booked four tickets to Argentina. When Henry realized that Richard discovered their plan to leave the country he confessed that Francis, the twins and himself accidentally killed a farmer while enacting an ancient ritual at Francis's country house. When they returned to Hampden, Bunny happened to see them covered in blood. So now he has been tormenting them and threatening to reveal their secret. The group was planning of going to Argentina but they didn’t have enough money to fund …show more content…

I really wanted to know what their motivations were for killing Bunny. I also liked how nothing was revealed right away. There were a whole bunch of secrets leading up to the murder that I found intensely interesting. Each character’s personality was very distinct from the other and I thought that was done very well. Although many of the characters were extremely unlikable, I found that they were all uniquely flawed and very realistic. I liked that I got to see each of the characters physiologically deal with killing Bunny in a very realistic way. I found that Richard was an unreliable narrator because everything we knew was from what people had told him, and we didn’t really know whether or not people were lying. Also because when he was just an outsider looking in at the group, the characters were made out to be wonderful people that you would want to be friends with. However, when he was accepted by the group we learned that each one of them holds at least one deep, dark secret and they are not the type of people you would want to be friends with. I liked that because I felt that I was Richard and we were figuring everything out

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