47 pages • 1 hour read
Donna TarttThe Secret History
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses incest, attempted murder, suicide, and attempted suicide.
When he returns to Hampden, Richard’s horrible nightmares about Bunny’s death resume, haunting him with their morbid details. Initially, the students process Bunny’s death in different ways. Richard spends less time with the classics students, often going for walks, seeing movies, and attending parties by himself. He notes that he feels “strangely free” (424). Henry also chooses to avoid the group, preferring to tend to his garden. Substantial tension also develops between the twins, who are now rarely seen together. Charles’s drinking gets worse, and Francis begins to experience heart troubles that are likely psychosomatic. In spite of this charged atmosphere, the twins continue to host their weekly dinners. At one of these dinners, the group notices a shattered mirror, and Charles tells a funny story about the accident that caused it to shatter, but Henry doesn’t appear to believe his story.
One night, Henry comes to Richard’s room and instructs Richard to go to the county jail, where Charles has been arrested for drunk driving in Henry’s car. When Richard goes to the jail, the police tell him that the car will have to be impounded, and Charles’s bail can’t be set until his arraignment at 9 a.m. Richard explains the situation to Henry, who tells him, “It’s best if you handle it” (443). Henry explains that Charles had to deal with “more than his share” (444) when being interviewed by the FBI during the search for Bunny. Charles’s license is suspended for eight months, and he is instructed to bring Henry with him to resolve the case. On the walk toward home, Charles shares that the FBI was much closer to catching them than they realized, and Henry’s odd personality drew negative attention to him. As Charles explains: “Henry looks a bit too good to be true” (448).
Back at Charles and Camilla’s apartment, Charles approaches Camilla and aggressively demands “a kiss for your jailbird brother” (453). When she tries to give him a kiss on the cheek, he forcefully turns her head and kisses her on the mouth in a decidedly unbrotherly way. Later that afternoon, Richard meets up with Francis, who details the full extent of Charles’s alcohol addiction and erratic behavior. He explains that Charles and Camilla often sleep together, and that Charles is very controlling and becomes jealous when she sleeps with anyone else. Francis also explains that Charles occasionally sleeps with him when he’s drunk and uses Francis’s attraction to manipulate him.
The antipathy between Charles and Henry grows deeper and deeper as Henry and Camilla become involved in a romantic relationship. Charles responds violently toward Camilla, and Henry secretly helps her move into a room at an expensive hotel, which he pays for. Charles’s drinking worsens to the point where he is sent to the hospital. While there, he deliriously asks for Camilla. Concerned about Charles’s condition, Richard approaches Henry one afternoon, and Henry recalls details about the night they murdered the farmer, stating, “It was the most important night of my life […] It enabled me to do what I’ve always wanted most […] To live without thinking” (493). Richard is greatly unnerved by Henry’s placidity, but he realizes that in a sense, he feels the same way about Bunny’s death.
When the students visit Julian, the professor produces a letter that was delivered to his campus mail long ago; he rarely checks is mail so has only just read it. The students realize with horror that the letter was written by Bunny and accuses them of murdering the farmer. The postmark indicates it was sent from Rome. At first, Julian casually discounts the letter as a strange prank, but eventually, he notices the seal and understands the situation immediately. Henry attempts to explain the situation to Julian, who nevertheless responds coldly. Julian then moves abroad, suddenly abandoning the classics program. The students grieve over Julian’s abandonment, struggling to process their disillusionment.
The college hires an incompetent temporary replacement for Julian and announces that all of the students will need to change their majors to a new department next semester. Richard has no choice but to transfer as many credits as possible into a new major, dismayed by his financial loss. His wealthy peers, however, have the luxury of abandoning their college educations entirely, refusing to compromise their aesthetics.
Meanwhile, Charles has been released from the hospital but continues to drink, and the students worry that he won’t make it to his court date. Richard, Camilla, and Francis plan an intervention to drag him to court, which they will disguise as “a party” (524). When Richard and Francis pick up Charles, Charles mentions that Henry gave him sleeping pills, which could’ve easily killed him in combination with his alcohol intake. Charles flees the intervention, and Richard and Francis go around town in pursuit of him. They go to Camilla’s room at the hotel and find Henry there with her. Charles drunkenly bursts into the room with a gun, intending to shoot Henry, but he misses and shoots Richard in the stomach instead. Henry then seizes the gun from Charles and shoots himself in the head.
Epilogue Summary
Richard recovers from his wound, but Henry dies. Richard’s narration states, “The business with Julian […] had impressed him deeply. I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles Julian had taught us to use” (544). In keeping with this line of thought, Richard recalls that the first sentence Julian taught him in Greek was “χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά. Beauty is harsh” (544). After Richard graduates, he starts to date Sophie, the girl he met at Bunny’s funeral, and whom Bunny had a crush on. He reluctantly moves back to California with Sophie for a job she gets in Los Angeles. They break up soon after he moves, however. Sophie tells Richard that he is “uncommunicative” (546) and she never knows what he is thinking.
While Richard is attending graduate school in California, he receives a suicide letter from Francis, who never recovered from Henry and Bunny’s deaths. Richard flies out to Boston in an attempt to save Francis and is met by Camilla, who also received a letter. Francis is still alive; in fact, he is in good spirits. He muses that he “keeps expecting Henry to show up” (553). Camilla explains that Charles ran off with an older woman he met in his detox ward and that no one has seen him since. She herself has remained with her aunt, sacrificing her life to serve as a live-in nurse. Richard confesses his love for Camilla, but Camilla tells him that she is still in love with Henry.
Richard reflects on one of Julian’s lessons, in which they examined a moving passage from the Iliad. In this passage, the dead Patroklos appears in a dream to his friend, Achilles. This reflection bleeds into a dream that Richard had about Henry. In this dream, he sees Henry in a strange museum, looking at a revolving machine that shows images of famous world monuments such as “the Parthenon […] the Pantheon […] the Colosseum” (558-59). In the dream, Henry claims he’s not dead, but “only having a bit of trouble with [his] passport” (559). When Richard asks if he’s happy where he is, Henry replies, “Not particularly […] But you’re not very happy where you are, either” (559).
Chapter 8-Epilogue Analysis
When Julian abandons his program upon surmising the real cause of Bunny’s death, the resulting fallout forces Richard to abandon his pretenses of wealth and status, and with this occurrence, the novel once again emphasizes the reality of False Identity as a Tool and a Trap. Although Richard was able to use his pretensions of wealth to gain access to opportunities far beyond his true social class, he does not have the means to course-correct when those same opportunities suddenly vanish. While his friends in the classics program are able to fall back on their trust funds and drop out of school altogether, Richard does not have this financial luxury. Not only must he plead to transfer his credits to another major, but he must ultimately abandon The Morbid Aesthetic of Death and Beauty that he so wholeheartedly adopted in his studies at the prestigious college and move back to California, reluctantly returning to his unhappy roots and picking up the pieces of his shattered life.
However, despite Richard’s many difficulties, Henry is even more shattered by Julian’s response to the revelation of Bunny’s murder. Because Julian’s philosophies exerted such a strong influence on Henry’s own psychology and approach to life, not to mention his own internal rationalization for the murders he perpetrated, it is clear that the resulting cognitive dissonance caused by Julian’s departure deprives Henry of the ability to live with his disillusionment. Thus, in Henry’s view, his own death serves as a necessary gesture, an attempt to make meaning from the “high cold principles Julian had taught [them] to use” (544), and with the specific circumstances of his own death, he attempts to apply The Morbid Aesthetic of Death and Beauty to his suicide in a desperate attempt to create meaning where none remains to be found. In a similar vein, Richard seeks his own sense of meaning from his tumultuous dreams of both Bunny and Henry, attempting to reach out to them just as Achilles does to the phantom of his dead friend Patroklos in the Iliad. Ultimately, however, the novel recognizes the impossibility of extracting meaning from these ancient figures, reflecting, “What we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining from a dead star” (558).
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By Donna Tartt
