47 pages • 1 hour read
The Secret History
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Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide describes murder.
The next semester draws near, and there is no sign of Henry, Charles, Camilla, or Francis. When Richard meets with Julian to process his registration cards, Julian expresses mild concern that he hasn’t seen the other students. Richard feels left out. Back in the commons area of his dorm, Richard sees Bunny drunkenly watching TV. Bunny appears to be in a bad mood, and when Richard inquires about what happened in Rome, Bunny ominously tells him that Henry is “not what [he] think[s] he is” (140). The next morning, Richard looks for his missing Greek textbook in Henry’s apartment and finds a disturbing scene of disarray. He discovers that Henry has booked four one-way, nonrefundable flights to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Richard spends the next few days in a state of anxious despair, wondering what the four students have planned without him. On a whim, he calls Francis’s mother in Boston, but she believes that Francis is at school. Bunny then approaches Richard, who lies on Francis’s behalf. When Richard asks about Rome again, Bunny remains tight-lipped but admits that Henry was annoyed about supporting his lavish spending habits.
When Richard goes to class on Monday, he is surprised to find everyone there. After class, Henry and Richard drive to Francis’s apartment, where Henry reveals that the only reason they didn’t stay in Buenos Aires is because they didn’t have enough money between them, as Henry’s allowance is released on a monthly basis. Henry explains that they needed a great deal of money because they had not planned to ever return to the United States. Richard then asks: “You killed somebody, didn’t you?” (163), to which Henry replies, “You’re just as smart as I thought you were” (163). He explains that he, Francis, Charles, and Camilla have been engaging in repeated bacchanals, wearing bedsheets and drinking copious amounts of wine to induce a state of frenzy in accordance with Julian’s teachings. Henry tells Richard that they have been trying to lose themselves in the midst of drinking and sex, just like the Greeks in the classic texts. Henry also reveals that Julian knew about their bacchanals and encouraged them in their practice.
Henry tells Richard that in the midst of their last bacchanal, they succeeded in achieving a state of self-abandonment. During their altered state, they violently murdered a local farmer on his property. Henry explains that he was not initially concerned that they would be charged with the murder because “[Vermont is] a primitive place” where “people die violent natural deaths all the time” (170).
Bunny, however, presents a problem, because he saw the four of them returning home in blood-soaked bedsheets. As Henry explains, Marion later showed Bunny a news headline about a local farmer being murdered, and Bunny unfortunately connected the dots. Henry is concerned that Bunny will tell people about what he saw and draw unwanted attention to their crime.
Chapter 5 Summary
Henry explains that his major aim in taking Bunny to Rome was to distract him and curry his favor. Once in Rome, however, Bunny proved insufferable, constantly needling him about the quality of the room, demanding money for extravagant purchases, and making dark jokes about the murder. Henry began to suffer from severe, stress-induced migraines. Eventually, he had to leave Rome early because he couldn’t function in Bunny’s presence. Henry explains that he knows Bunny won’t go to the police immediately, because they are old friends. Rather, Bunny feels indignant about being “left out” (192) and is far more likely to reveal their secret through loud-mouthed complaints and dark humorous jabs. He also reveals that Bunny is essentially blackmailing him for money.
Back in his room, Richard works on his Greek assignment for the next day. He also muses that he feels close to his fellow classics students because they share his knowledge of this “beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead” (200). Richard goes to visit Bunny and finds him with Charles and Camilla. Bunny casually remarks that he and Henry have planned a trip to France that summer. When Camilla and Charles find a private moment with Richard, they divulge that they know “Henry told [him]” (204). Over the next few weeks, Bunny heightens his campaign against his fellow classics students, teasing Richard about his lower-class wardrobe, needling Francis about being gay, and chiding the twins about their incestuous relationship. Bunny’s outbursts against Henry also grow increasingly intense and erratic, and the group worries that he might confide in Marion.
Henry begins to formulate a series of plans to murder Bunny without drawing suspicion. At first, he contemplates poisoning Bunny with mushrooms, but ultimately, he decides that the best way to kill Bunny is to push him off the edge of a wooded ravine near the campus. On an unnaturally warm April day, the group of classics students congregates in the woods to wait for Bunny. Eventually, Bunny encounters them on his hike, drinking a beer as he walks. Henry pushes Bunny into the ravine.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
In Chapters 4 and 5, the narrative further develops the strange bond between the classics students, which ultimately stems from their shared experiences studying the Greek language, adopting practices based on ancient mystery cults, and cultivating a sense of appreciation for the pastoral beauty of the ancient world. As they sink deeply into their exclusive studies with Julian, they inhabit an insular world of texts, references, philosophies, and ideas that cannot be directly interpreted into English or into modern daily life. Further highlighting the ongoing theme of The Morbid Aesthetic of Death and Beauty, Richard characterizes the Greek language itself as a “beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead” and describes “looking up from [our] books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not [our] home” (200). Thus, it is clear from his musings that both he and the other classics students are becoming indoctrinated into the peculiar mindset that Julian actively cultivates through his teachings. Thus, the inadvertently murderous behavior of the students is something for which the professor himself is partially responsible, even though at this point in the narrative, he lacks knowledge of just how extreme their interpretations of his lessons have become.
Additionally, the insular, secret kinship that characterizes the relationship of the classics students also explains the psychology of their collaboration to murder Bunny, for their immersion in this half-imaginary world of the classics has become so all-consuming that committing a murder to preserve its integrity has come to seem like a reasonable option. Ultimately, Henry exploits Richard’s need to be included and affirmed by the group and uses him to keep an eye on Bunny’s behavior even as he himself plots ways to permanently eliminate Bunny as a threat and an obstacle. Additionally, Henry uses Julian’s teachings to rationalize his own plans to murder Bunny in cold blood. He even mirrors Julian’s use of language, for just as the professor states, “The country people who live around me are fascinating because their lives are so closely bound to fate that they really are predestined” (29), Henry uses similar language to assert that “[Vermont is] a primitive place” where “people die violent natural deaths all the time” (170). In this way, Henry appropriates the lofty ideals of the group’s classics courses to reimagine the mundane setting of Vermont within The Morbid Aesthetic of Death and Beauty, asserting that the state’s very nature predisposes it to serving as a location in which violent death is both natural and commonplace. Thus, he invokes a misguided use of pastoral imagery to fallaciously claim that his own murderous impulses are merely an extension of this worldview. His level of careful, rational planning therefore makes Bunny’s death seem inevitable, even fated.
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