The Secret History”

Description

Donna Tartt is the author of the psychological thriller, dark academia novel “The Secret History”, 1992. The story revolves around a group of elite college students at a fictional liberal arts college in Vermont, Hampden College. These students study the classics under enigmatic, intellectually demanding professor Julian Morrow’s guide in an exclusive, secretive group.

Richard Papen, the protagonist and narrator, is the son of a modestly middle-class family from California who comes to Hampden to escape his mundane life. He is drawn to this enigmatic group of students: Henry Winter, the charismatic figure; Charles and Camilla Macaulay, the dashing twins; Bunny Corcoran, the troubled soul; and Francis Abernathy, the oddity end. The group became more and more fascinate with the ancient Greek philosophy, especially Dionysian rituals, which sucked him into their world down a dark and destructive path.

A murder is indeed the central event of the novel-it’s the unveiling of the events not only on the way to it, but also those in consequence of a psychological conception afterward. The pupils’ moral degradation, helped by intellectual arrogance and losing contact with reality, serves as the motivating force for the tension of the novel. Pictures of guilt, beauty, betrayal, and how privilege corrupts must evolve in all aspects of the story as they go through their consequences.

The novel has lovely prose, complex characters, and the study of human nature in it; therefore, it falls under the tag of a modern classic in literary fiction.