“Light shining from a dead star”: Narratology and Perspective in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

While reflecting on a countryside getaway with his fellow classics students, Richard Papen, the narrator of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, states, “The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business” (Tartt 79). From the start of the story, Richard orients his reader toward a specific view of his time at Hampden College, the university he attends in Vermont—one marked but not burdened by a murderous act that he and his companions commit against one of their own. The tension between the emotional lyricism of the text’s prose and the foundational, often off-the-page brutality of its subject matter exemplifies Richard’s enduring love for his friends and his “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (7). However, this textual exegesis also grants Richard the only lasting control available to him: organizing, and thus attempting to make sense of, the story from his own perspective. I argue Richard utilizes his narrative authority to immortalize his friends' memories and to conceal a greater personal tragedy revealed at the story’s climactic conclusion. Meanwhile, Tartt's debut novel subverts the pedagogically dominant styles of college writing program craft that defined the period, and she instead imbues into the novel an antiquarian sensibility, one indebted to past literary histories such as the nineteenth-century American gothic and classical Greek literature.