The Inner Landscape

I. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates’s iconic short story—which you likely read because basically everybody reads it at some point in school—is about the loss of innocence. It’s also about fantasy versus reality. It’s something your favorite resident blogger (🙋🏻‍♂️) has been thinking about a lot as I looked over the essay dropping today. I actually began it back in May when the last post dropped on May 4th. As I dove back in to tackle it again, it seemed far more relevant to me now.

There’s a particular kind of madness that doesn’t come from inside the mind at all, but from the institutions built to contain it. You realize you’re facing one of them if you’re in a room and you can still see those windows—you know the ones we talk about here—but even if you wanted to jump out of them with great determination and a tremendous amount of desperation, you couldn’t. Even if you’re on the first floor.

Every era has its own version of a sort of ark—the place where society quietly deposits the people it doesn’t want. (Read: dumps them.)

If you’ve been sticking with us since the beginning, or if you’re just now joining and deciding to take a look at the older posts, you know we bounce around dealing with different kinds of shadows. We use the flashlight to help us walk through them, and while we can’t avoid the scars, our humor manages to make the trip just a tad more accessible.

We’ve looked at varying kinds of books tackling these dark spaces. We began with the foundational text for this blog, Lie Down in Darkness, and then moved on to kick up the humor with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. From there, we decided to give it a different spin and see what happens when individuals don’t wish to shake the shadows, but actually seek them out, trying to grasp them and hold on as tight as possible—in both Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and John Knowles’s A Separate Piece.

I mentioned in the blog’s opening manifesto that we’d focus primarily on fiction, but I also noted the site was architecturally built to expand. So now we’re taking our first whack at an actual non-fiction work. We leave our last cycle behind and move toward what happens when people either seek out or are dumped into the places where shadows are supposed to be handled.

It’s something that grows even darker, and maybe even more difficult to process: the fact that historically, more often than not, people are just there—and actually dealing with the shadows was never really part of the deal.

II. Noah Only Had to Deal With Actual Animals

We have, of course, been speaking of shadows all along. As long as there have been people who have struggled with them, society has often chosen to just toss them even deeper down into the darkness. Nellie Bly, in her time on Blackwell’s Island, demonstrated in her work Ten Days in a Mad-House that the asylum was nothing more than a cold stone warehouse for inconvenient women. And trust me: society’s thoughts on mental illness haven’t really changed, nor has its ability to help all that much.

Nowadays, the architecture of the hospitals is more elegant, the paperwork is definitely much longer (thank you, insurance companies), and the cruelty is merely more politely phrased. But the logic remains clear, and it hasn’t changed: you just lock the problem away and you call it CARE. (And congratulations on discovering the way I write these blog pieces is through dictation—I’ve never understood why audio always capitalizes CARE, but it’s never seemed more fitting than right here, dripping with irony.)

At its simplest, it’s all about stashing people away, ignoring their needs and necessary assistance, and hoping no one looks too closely at the cracks that are showing.

If you traced the map of American institutional cruelty, you would eventually land in Newark—a city that has spent more than a century trying to outrun its reputation as a place where the unwanted are quietly warehoused. When I was originally drafting this piece in my head, my phonetic way of writing kept trying to turn Newark into an ark, but honestly, that feels more true. Because that’s what these places were: arks. It’s just that they were not built to save people from the flood, but to hide them from the world.

The goal was to load them up and ship them out of sight. It was a repository for the inconvenient, the unwell, the unprotected, and the group that still clearly rings through to everyone: the unprofitable. It was designed to drift just far enough offshore so it was out of sight, ensuring no one ever had to see what was happening on the inside or feel uncomfortable.

III. Good Thing One Woman Decided Not to Stay Quiet

Nellie Bly didn’t just walk onto Blackwell’s Island. She walked directly into a national habit—the American instinct to build a structure, slap the word CARE on the door, and hope the architecture could do the moral labor that the people inside refused to do. The more one reads Bly’s book, the more one realizes the madhouse wasn’t an aberration. It was a blueprint.

The thing about these arks, old or new, is that they all run on the same quiet assumption: once you’re inside, the world simply forgets. Every era has its version—Blackwell’s Island had its own cold quarters, and every generation builds its upgraded model of “out of sight, out of mind.” Which is why Nellie Bly’s decision to walk straight into one of her own accord was extraordinarily brave. Some would say borderline deranged, but in the best possible way.

While the rest of the country was content to let this ark drift, Bly climbed aboard with a notebook, a plan, and a stubborn curiosity—the exact kind of stubbornness institutions hate most, where the passenger actually pays attention. It’s the kind that says, Steer me directly to the problem so I can take notes, not away from it. The kind that screams, Don’t you dare try to hide it from me.

Eventually, every ark gets a passenger who refuses to drift away quietly. Bly walked into Blackwell’s Island with the kind of confidence only a woman pretending to be insane could muster. She didn’t tiptoe in; she marched straight through the front door like someone checking into a hotel with atrocious Yelp reviews about mildew, cockroaches, and the distinct possibility that someone might stab you in the middle of the night.

The rest of the country was content to let these institutions sink into their own rot. But Nellie Bly allowed herself to be swallowed up by it entirely whole just to discover what the belly of the beast looked like. And it turned out to be exactly what one would expect: cold, cruel, and run by people who elevated indifference to a dangerous art form.

IV. Hospitals, Indeed, Do Have Bad Food

Inside Blackwell’s Island, Nellie Bly discovered that CARE was mostly a performance staged for the benefit of men who never bothered to look all that closely. And it wasn’t a pleasant performance either. We’re speaking Shakespeare here—and not the comedies. The food was barely edible, the water was freezing, and the nurses treated the patients with a bitter contempt usually reserved for people who dared to exist inconveniently. What was supposed to be a temporary stay to get your feet under you became a permanent exile—a bother, an afterthought, and, most devastatingly, a designation of being inherently lesser than everyone else.

The whole place ran on the unspoken assumption that women were fragile enough to be locked away, but sturdy enough to survive ice-cold baths, neglect, and starvation rations without complaint. Meanwhile, the men overseeing the institution (natch) remained comfortably distant (naturally), convinced that everyone was perfectly fine—which is historically consistent with how men act when in charge of women’s suffering. Bly didn’t have to write dark satire; the madhouse simply provided it for her.

But the real indictment of Blackwell’s Island wasn’t the cold, the food, or even the nurses. It was the inmates themselves. It was a cast of women who weren’t mad so much as inconvenient—immigrants who didn’t speak English (sounds familiar), wives who talked back (that too), women who cried at the wrong times (yep, still familiar), and women who didn’t cry at the expected, polite times (you get the point).

In other words: the usual suspects.

The madhouse functioned less as a hospital and more as a filing cabinet for any woman who disrupted the fragile egos of the men running the world outside. The joke, of course, was that the women inside were often far saner than the men who put them there. Bly didn’t need to exaggerate a single absurdity; she just jotted down everything she saw.

V. Bob Seger Was Right: Still the Same

What strikes me most about reading Nellie Bly’s account isn’t just the catalogue of cruelties—extensive as they were: the baths, the food, the nurses treating human suffering as a mere inconvenience—but the way the entire system depended on total silence. Blackwell’s Island didn’t need to hide its abuses; it simply needed the world to avert its eyes. And for the most part, the world was all too willing to oblige.

That’s the part that feels most familiar right now, after a two-month vanishing embedded inside a toxic, unendurable seven-month stretch of silence from the healthcare system. Institutions don’t collapse because they’re cruel; they thrive because they’re allowed to be cruel—allowed to exist, allowed to function, and permitted to be completely useless.

Nellie Bly understood this implicitly back then, and I understand it implicitly now. She wasn’t just documenting misery; she was documenting the machinery that makes such misery possible. And once you see the machinery, you can never unsee it. You start noticing the gears everywhere: in hospitals, shelters, psych wards, and insurance companies—every place where the most vulnerable are told to sit down and shut up while administrative paperwork catches up with their “appalling” request for basic humanity.

The most chilling thing as I prepared to update this piece is how much it cuts me to the bone.

VI. Blackwell’s Island Didn’t Die—It Franchised

What makes Nellie Bly’s reporting feel less like history and more like a rerun is how little of it sounds outdated. Swap the 19th-century corsets for paper scrubs, trade the asylum matron for underpaid psych techs running on caffeine and despair, replace the cold baths with cost-saving measures, and congratulations: you’ve successfully recreated half of the psychiatric facilities in this country, complete with modern insurance and an ethically bankrupt healthcare system. The script hasn’t changed since Bly’s time; it’s just a classic show they decided to reboot.

We still have administrators who insist everything is fine from offices they never leave, staff who confuse cruelty with efficiency, and a public perfectly content to believe that suffering becomes dignified if you file the right paperwork. Blackwell’s Island didn’t die; it franchised. And every time I read Bly describing some new indignity, lately I keep thinking: Of course. You betcha. Oh my, yes. Of course they did that. Of course they got away with it.

Institutions don’t evolve; they just learn to animate—or is it laminate?—their excuses.

What Nellie Bly exposed—and what still feels uncomfortably familiar—is that institutions don’t need to be competent to be powerful; they just need to be unchallenged. Blackwell’s Island thrived not because it was well-run, but because no one bothered to check whether it was being run at all. Staff could starve women, freeze them, ignore them, mock them, and call it “treatment,” and the world would politely assume otherwise because the word hospital was printed on the door.

If that sounds harsh, congratulations: you’ve clearly never tried navigating a modern psych ward where the decor is nice, the language is softer, and the cruelty is wrapped in mission statements about compassion. We’ve upgraded the furniture, but certainly not the ethics.

This is why Bly’s work feels less like a historical document and more like a user manual for the present. (And if you’ve been with me since The Bell Jar, you know user manuals have been a bit difficult for me lately.) We still funnel the inconvenient into buildings designed to “help” them walk quietly, hoping they stay out of sight long enough for the rest of us to feel normal. The madhouse never vanished. It just learned to file quarterly reports.

If you think that’s progress, you’re probably the kind of person who believes a fresh coat of paint can fix a collapsing foundation—where you literally scream at the top of your lungs and absolutely no one answers, even when it’s their job to do so.

VII. Sorry, But I’m Really Sick of This Shit

What Nellie Bly ultimately revealed—and what remains this country‘s favorite party trick—is how effortlessly institutions congratulate themselves for solving problems they never intended to fix. Blackwell’s Island had entire committees dedicated to praising their own benevolence while women froze in the hallways. Today, we’ve upgraded to glossy brochures, inspirational posters, and mission statements written by people who have never set foot on the units they oversee—executives sitting in offices where they never pick up the phone to speak to the human beings whose lives their decisions destroy.

It’s the same magic trick with much better lighting: make the suffering disappear by pretending it’s being handled.

If anyone dares to point out the obvious—that institutional rot filters down from the very top—the institution simply smiles, gestures at a leather binder full of “protocols,” and hopes you’re too polite to notice that none of them are actually followed. Long before the rest of us caught on, institutions proved they don’t fear chaos: they fear witnesses. They can survive cruelty, incompetence, starvation rations, freezing baths, and staff who treat human beings like administrative clutter. What they cannot survive is anyone paying attention.

Nellie Bly walked into Blackwell’s Island with nothing but a notebook and the audacity to look directly at what everyone else pretended not to see. More than a century later, the only goddamn thing that’s really changed is the decor. The madhouse has just been rebranded. We don’t call it an asylum anymore. We call it CARE.

And trust me: if that isn’t the funniest, bleakest punchline in American history, I don’t know what is.

VIII. The Rebranding of the Madhouse

So maybe that’s the part that should embarrass us most: not that Blackwell’s Island existed, but that its logic is still alive and well, just wearing a slightly nicer outfit and convincing you it’s better. The system pats itself on the back for “progress,” as if swapping stone walls for drywall counts as moral evolution. We point to a modern hospital and say, Look how humane we are now, while quietly ignoring the understaffed units, the endless waitlists, the insurance denials, and the fluorescent-lit purgatory where people sit as their lives fall apart in real time.

If Bly were alive today, she wouldn’t need to fake insanity to get inside—she’d just need to show up in an ER and say she was having a bad week. The system would handle the rest while a doctor nodded and said, “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. A line spoken so often in mental health, but six words that have never meant less.

Because that’s the real punchline, isn’t it? We didn’t dismantle the madhouse. We decentralized it. We spread it across cities, suburbs, insurance networks, and intake forms so no one has to feel guilty about locking people away and ignoring their needs. We just make sure the process is more polite. Instead of cold baths, we have “cost-effective interventions.” Instead of starvation rations, we have “budget constraints.” Instead of matrons with sticks, we have administrators with clipboards—and we keep insisting this is CARE, this is compassion, this is the best we can do.

Nellie Bly saw through the performance in 1887. The only difference now is that the performance has more money and a far better marketing department.

IX. Decentralizing the Madhouse

You can call the crisis line when you need help. The number is plastered across social media, emails, and websites. But nobody tells you what to do when you’re pouring out your heart in the dark and all they do is hang up on you.

Ask me. I know.

And maybe that’s why Nellie Bly’s story still hits like a slap: not because the past was monstrous, but because the present keeps insisting it’s better while quietly recycling the exact same brand of nonsense logic. We’d love to pretend we’ve outgrown the era of locking women away for being inconvenient—emotional, foreign, loud, quiet, or simply living at the wrong volume. But scroll through any modern intake form, sit in any ER waiting room, or try navigating the labyrinth of insurance approvals, and you’ll find the same old categories dressed up in clinical language: non-compliant, difficult, unstable, needs further evaluation. It’s the 21st-century version of hysterical. It’s just been transferred to anyone who is suffering, and now it comes with a billing code.

Progress, apparently, just means learning how to monetize the madhouse.

X. Walking Through the Shadows with a Flashlight

Maybe that’s what Nellie Bly understood long before the rest of us managed to catch up: institutions don’t change because they’re wrong—they change because someone forces them to. She didn’t expose Blackwell’s Island because she believed the system could be redeemed. She exposed it because she knew the only way to make the country look at the shadows was to shove the truth under its nose and refuse to let it look away.

More than a century later, we’re still playing the same game—pretending cruelty becomes compassion if you laminate it, pretending suffering becomes dignified if written in the passive voice, pretending the madhouse is gone because we renamed it.

Bly didn’t buy the illusion. And if we’re honest, neither should we. Neither shall I. Ever.

When talking about Ten Days in a Mad-House, we’re not just speaking about a piece of investigative journalism from 1887. We are once again looking through a window—the very window we keep trying to smash through to escape, or repaint so we can’t see through, or tilt at an angle more flattering to our reflection. Yet it remains exactly the same. Bly didn’t expose a broken system; she exposed a functioning one—a system doing precisely what it was designed to do: hide the people who make society uncomfortable and call it mercy.

Sound familiar?

If that sounds bleak, so be it—because it is. But it’s also funny in that dark, American way: the way we keep insisting we’ve changed while standing in the same room, staring at the same cracks, pretending they’re part of the decor.

Perhaps that’s the real legacy of Bly‘s work and the reforms that followed—not the headlines, not the brief national outrage (notice the word brief), but the uncomfortable truth she forced into the light: institutions don’t become humane on their own. They don’t grow consciences. They don’t wake up one morning and decide to stop hurting people. They change only when someone walks straight into the belly of the beast, takes notes, and refuses to shut up about what they saw.

Nellie Bly did that, and we owe her an immense gratitude—but more importantly, we owe her the fight.

Because more than a century later, the only things we’ve improved are the name and the branding on the building. The madhouse is still here—scattered, disguised, and politely renamed, but still humming with the exact same logic.

And if that doesn’t make you laugh—even a little—then you haven’t been paying attention. We walk through the shadows with a flashlight and mocking humor because that’s just enough to keep us going, no matter the cost or the scars accrued.

If for no other reason, in honor of Nellie Bly—

We sure as hell continue to fight.

Ghosts, Gentlemen, and the Art of Falling Apart

If you’re confused by the number you missed a few announcements. The blog is now posting on Tuesdays and Fridays. At the end of each post the books will be listed through the upcoming few weeks. Yes, I’ve gone from foolish assuming you’ll still want to read each book after I discuss it to maybe even wanting to read it to be prepared for your own take on my thoughts. Oh, the horror (this is the horror film fan response used regarding instead of using the more well known you know what happens when you assume something.) I also am adding a suggested title in case you enjoyed a particular post and and are interested in reading further into the author.

We’ve finally crawled out of Comala. After wandering through Juan Rulfo’s graveyard of voices—the dead whispering, the living barely louder—I thought we’d earned a break. A little sunlight. A little levity. Maybe even a book where someone isn’t doomed from page one.

But, well… I lied. Sort of. (But we’ll keep this one shorter. Shorter with two books. That’s a fair trade, right?)

Apparently, my subconscious had other plans. Instead of choosing something bright and cheerful, I reached for Walker Percy—a man constitutionally incapable of writing about anyone who isn’t “spiritually concussed”. Somehow, without meaning to, I picked two books that slide perfectly into the arc we just finished. We left behind ghosts who wanted to be heard, only to arrive with a man who moves through the world like he doesn’t even know he’s alive. Fun times had by all.

Welcome to the next arc: Identity, Collapse, Absurdity, and that strange clarity that comes when the self finally cracks.

This time, we’re following Will Barrett—first in The Last Gentleman, where he drifts through life like a polite apparition, and then in The Second Coming, where that drift becomes a full-scale psychiatric nosedive. If Pedro Páramo was about the dead refusing to stay silent, Percy gives us the opposite: a man who can’t quite hear himself.

And yes, this arc will be darker in places. But it will also at times be funnier. Even Percy is a master of the absurd; he gives us permission to laugh again. We need that desperately—to laugh at the shadows when we see the flash. Think of this as the season where the critics say the show finally remembers it’s allowed to have jokes after a few episodes that were “powerful” but deeply exhausting.

So let’s step out of Comala, shake the dust off our shoes, and follow Will Barrett into the next landscape—one where ghosts aren’t dead, identity is as Paul Simon says “slip-slidin’ away,” and sometimes the only way forward is through a complete and total collapse.

Part One: The Drifting Ghost

What makes The Last Gentleman so quietly devastating is that Will Barrett doesn’t just move like a ghost—he relates like one. His relationships aren’t connections so much as they are collisions. He drifts into people’s lives the way fog drifts into a room: present, aimless, without intention, without shape, and without the ability to grasp or hold onto anything.

His interactions with the Vaught family are the clearest example. They adopt him emotionally before he ever decides to be adopted. They project meaning onto him because he doesn’t have any for himself. Will becomes a blank surface onto which other people write their needs, their grief, and their expectations. Because he doesn’t know who he is, he simply lets them.

That’s the tragedy of Will Barrett: He is a man who becomes whatever the room requires.

• Not out of manipulation.

• Not out of deceit.

• But because he has no internal anchor.

As we learned from Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, an anchor isn’t just a weight; it’s a requirement. It keeps you tethered and attached to the world. Without it, you simply float away.

His romance with Kitty Vaught is just another version of this pattern. It’s not even a love story in the sense that we usually understand it—it’s a ghost story. Will doesn’t fall in love; he drifts into it. He’s drawn to her because she possesses a solidity he lacks. She knows who she is, even when she’s wrong. Will doesn’t know who he is, even in the moments when he’s right.

Percy writes him with this eerie, floating quality—a man who is always slightly out of phase with his own life. He is simply completely uninhabited as a person. He’s not a ghost because he died. He’s a ghost because he’s never fully arrived.

Part Two: The Freefall

Where The Last Gentleman is drifting, The Second Coming is a freefall.

In this stage of the journey, Will Barrett’s relationships aren’t just collisions—they are implosions. His marriage, his faith, and his sense of purpose have all dissolved. Even his body betrays him, with neurological episodes that blur the line between physical illness and a total psychological collapse.

And then there’s Allison.

Allison is the key to this deeper dive because she is the mirror Will didn’t know he needed. She isn’t a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”—she isn’t there to save him. She is a young woman who has survived her own psychiatric trauma, escaped an institution, and is attempting to rebuild a self from the ground up. She is what Will might become if he survives his own collapse. She represents the possibility of clarity on the other side of a breakdown.

Their relationship is a moment of vivid recognition. They are two people who have fallen through the floor of their own identities and crashed into the same basement.

Will’s descent into the cave—an actual, literal cave—is one of the most striking metaphors for psychiatric collapse in American fiction. It is a mind turning itself inside out. This connects perfectly to the “Well” scenes in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Whether it’s a well in Japan or a cave in the American South, the message is the same: When the self collapses, the world becomes a map of that collapse.

Percy’s use of the absurd isn’t just comic relief. It’s the reality of how the world looks when your mind is “frying”. Everything becomes too sharp, too strange, and simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

Yet, this is where the hope lives. Will Barrett’s collapse finally forces him to confront the question he’s been avoiding for decades: Who am I when no one is looking? For Will Barrett, the answer isn’t pretty, but it is real. That is why The Second Coming ultimately feels more hopeful than The Last Gentleman.

Collapse becomes clarity. Absurdity becomes survival. Connection becomes possible.

And with that there’s hope. Only a tiny bit. But sometimes, that’s just enough.

Closing: Where We’re Headed Next (And why I’m still reading books about people falling apart—and you are, too. You’re still here, aren’t you? Hello?)

So, that’s where we’re leaving Will Barrett for now: halfway between a ghost, a gentleman, and a man who has finally realized that the floor beneath him is not, in fact, load-bearing. If The Last Gentleman was a gentle nudge toward existential confusion, The Second Coming is a shove down the stairs—but in a way that somehow leaves you feeling hopeful. About the possible.

Now that we’ve officially entered the “Psychiatric Arc,” things are only going to get stranger, darker, and—mercifully—funnier. If I’ve learned anything from literature, from life, and from the more than occasional visits (um, yeah, that’s an s) to the psych ward, it’s that the universe has a terrible sense of humor. The only winning move is to laugh first.

That’s why you’re here with me: to help me laugh at the shadows while we look for the flash.

The Upcoming Tuesday/Friday Schedule:

• Tuesday, May 12: Ten Days in a Mad-House (Nellie Bly)

• Friday, May 15: The Snake Pit (Mary Jane Ward)

• Tuesday, May 19: Shutter Island (Dennis Lehane)

• Friday, May 22: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

• Tuesday, May 26: Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)

• Friday, May 29: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Joanne Greenberg)

• Tuesday, June 2: Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)

• Friday, June 5: The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• Tuesday, June 9: Darkness Visible (William Styron)

More Walker Percy?: Try his debut novel The Moviegoer.

ONWARD

I. The final Saturday Night Live cold open: looking forward by looking back one more time

When I began the blog, I said it was being built and it was something I had never attempted before. I stated it was being built from the foundation up, so it was open to change. In the second week, I added the Saturday Night Live cold open because it was appropriate to talk about the previous book and I thought we could use some humor before we dive down into the darkness. I said that humor was important to get us through the shadows with our flashlight. It was the only thing we had other than the flashlight, but of course, since we’re now on our sixth book, it seems time to retire that tradition. But The Bell Jar, which was the last thing we covered, took that exercise to its fully complete end.

This is a place where we dance with shadows; we move back and forth, up and down, around. We engage with them and we don’t hide from them in this place. That’s what leads us forward when we dip into the inner landscape, because when you dance with the shadows they get inside—it’s impossible sometimes to keep them out. At the beginning of the blog, I threw a few metaphors at you. I mean, this place isn’t called The Inner Landscape for no reason. And having a domain name like A Shadow Dancer is basically filled with metaphor itself. But both those examples are happily metaphorical for the reasons I just explained: to make the unknown more known, the ungraspable more graspable.

I told you the way I perceived to look at things when this whole thing started. It was going to be as the literature professor I had hoped to become before my own shadows tried to drag me into the darkness and they stayed. It was going to be using the skills that I had developed—starting at St. Petersburg Junior College with English studies, but developed further at Eckerd College and the Solstice MFA at Pine Manor. I adapted and went deep into the craft of the writing that I had only up to then been engaging with in an analytical form. And then I told you I would see it as someone who understood shadows infinitely; who saw them in front of me and around me as companions I didn’t want but walked alongside. Someone who knew the forest and walked the desert of darkness for 40 straight years.

And I told you we would do this together because it’s stronger that way, but we would do it the way I had adapted to do it. It’s just my sense of humor. It’s just what’s gotten me through everything. The primary example is telling someone I’m not feeling well—in the past I would say, “I’ll actually, if I can’t handle it anymore, take a really big running start before I jump and leap headfirst out my bedroom window.” And of course, the joke being that my bedroom window is on the first floor. It’s humor that’s developed through decades of wandering the mental darkness. More importantly, a humor that’s helped me to survive. As the manifesto says for this place—Viktor Frankl—even just a tiny few seconds of humor is enough to keep you going.

II. The journey through the windows

And so that was the plan of the blog. You, me, a flashlight, and shadows as we wandered our way through all of these things. I picked books apart using all three of those different angles. Sometimes more than others, focusing on one, sometimes all three at once, just going with what seemed appropriate depending on the book. With the books we’re dealing with and I’ve dealt with so far, it is not an easy journey no matter how much humor we have. We’ve read six books actually now if you’ve been with me from the start, but the journey is so much deeper. The darkness is so much more vast. It’s not for everyone, but it’s always been my belief that looking into the shadows and walking through the forest helps us understand.

It’s why I talked about how fiction gives us a window into lives. It’s why I kicked us off with the book that didn’t seem to have really much or frankly any humor in it at all: William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. But it did most assuredly have a window into the soul of three very different people: Milton, Helen, and Peyton Loftis. And Peyton, tortured by her family and her own shadows, desperately saw a window and looked out of it, at the potential of a better place. But when Peyton was looking outside the window, she was really looking inside of herself. Ultimately, being incapable of retaining all of the pain that she underwent, she saw in the grace of the birds something she couldn’t attain—calm, peace, joy. Peyton opened that window and she jumped out to bond with the birds, to join them in their flight. I said in that essay Peyton couldn’t fly. None of us can.

But it’s why at the end I also said we don’t have to fly. We just need to look through the windows to see the stories they’re telling us. To understand. No matter how smudged and dirty they are, we can learn so much by glancing through them. Yes, Peyton jumped to attempt to fly. She jumped out of the window, but as I said, windows are also reflections that we can see ourselves in our own inner journeys.

Our next book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, however, used windows as trapdoors. We discovered pretty early with Toru and his ironing and spaghetti that shadows can take on different meanings. When Toru looked at his window, everything looked fine. But we learned in the world of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that in literature there is one similar replication often found: the center cannot hold. So Toru’s life was shaken up and he had to enter a well—the window, actually, being underneath him. A many-fathomed, very lonely place where spaghetti and ironing were useless, and the only voice was his own, which was not enough as he remained quiet to listen to the bird as it wound down. And we began to discover sometimes you have to do the work yourself, as hard as it is, for as long as it takes.

After Lie Down in Darkness and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, we shifted our angle. We had spent two weeks asking what happens when the shadows come for you—when they stalk you, wrap around you like a coat you can’t shrug off. So this time we asked a different question: what happens when people go looking for the shadows on purpose? Was it intentional or not? What happens when you make the call to seek the darkness on your own?

So we turned to The Secret History. We talked about Julian, the little vicious nightmare hobbit masquerading as a professor. We talked about Donna Tartt telling us on page one that a murder happened, then tying us to a chair and making us sit through 500 pages on the edge of our seats ourselves, desperate to find out why. We talked about how no one realized just how much she clearly adored The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And by the end, we discovered the truth: when you seek destruction, even under the banner of what seems the most heightened beauty, the erosion is inevitable.

So then we asked the inevitable next question: if all these corrupt, brilliant, unhinged little monsters were already in college, what happens if we get to someone before they’re corrupted? Since all the kids in The Secret History were already doomed by the time they hit college, we dropped down a level—the high school. We’re talking about A Separate Peace, with John Knowles stapling biblical symbolism to the narrative with all the subtlety of a freshman who had just discovered metaphor. My brain was foggy when I wrote this part of the night and during these 19 weeks that seem like they’re never going to end—so the character names had slipped a bit, but you know who I mean: the protagonist who narrates the whole thing, annoyed because he can’t study, irritated because his friend keeps pestering him, and completely unaware as a result that he’s already doomed.

Honestly, this section was a mess. But so were they. Still, we learned things. We learned that John Knowles does, in fact, have a sense of humor. He must. I refuse to believe the ski troop subplot could possibly be meant seriously. I simply refuse. And even if it was, God help us, we still got Blitzball, which is so bizarre it circles back around to being delightful.

And then I asked the question that’s been haunting me for weeks: can a writer know too much about their own source material? Which is how we ended up in the world of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. And we ripped off the Band-Aid. I had to give a trigger warning. And oh, did we discover lots of things there.

III. I always knew I knew more than my college professor

When I was in college, I took a 20th-century literary theory course. Each week we would read the same books, but then I’d have to read the literary theory on them. I remember The Tempest and The Awakening—something that greatly appalled the professor because they had replaced Katherine Anne Porter with The Awakening, and she was definitely not a fan.

So each week we would read these various literary theories and then see how they looked at each book through that lens. Now as we developed later into the course, it started to get even darker than shadows. Postmodern structuralism is about as dark as anything you can possibly conceive of; I remember calling out how depressing it is. And frankly, whichever one it was that tried to convince me that the writer doesn’t even know what they’re saying remains so bizarre to me to be incalculable. I refuse to figure out which one it was because it’s just a dumb thing. I just know anything that’s got “Post” in front of it, I detested. But I settled on mine pretty early: Reader-Response.

It sits at the center of how I read, how I write, and how I understand literature. Reader-Response is the one that always has made the most sense to me. It says that a book is not a fixed object. It is a living thing that changes depending on who is reading it, when they are reading it, and what they bring with them when they open the first page. Reader-Response says the text is only half the story. The other half is the reader. The book gives you the words, but you give it the meaning. You bring your history, your wounds, your fears, your humor, your memories, and yes, your shadows. And the book meets you where you are. That is why a book you loved at 16 can devastate you at 30. It’s not that the book has changed—it hasn’t. You have.

And that is exactly what happened to me with The Bell Jar.

IV. The manual, the map, and such deep regret

It wasn’t just a novel. It became a mirror. It became a map. It became a warning. It became a record of what happened when the world fails you at every level. And because of Reader-Response, it didn’t just tell me what happened to Esther Greenwood. It told me something about myself. It told me something about the systems we still live under that I have witnessed with such a deep and immense pain these past 19 weeks as I have stood in my own darkness, totally incomplete and alone. It told me something about the shadows that follow us and the ones we go looking for without realizing it.

About the person who was reaching out for me with their hand, asking me to help them, but I didn’t see it then, I didn’t know it then, I didn’t understand it then. And so it didn’t work. It didn’t work for them clearly because they are no longer with us. When you get a feeling to reach out for someone because, even though you don’t know why, you feel a certain way for them because the shadows have left scars on you so deeply you don’t know how to care about people, but you know that’s the one person that just maybe seemed, just maybe, to actually think it could work and you want to reach out and you discover they’re not here anymore… you carry with you the guilt. How do you come back from that?

And when you ask for help as someone who has never asked for help—when you had your first stroke and couldn’t walk—you still had your humor because you looked at your cat after falling upon waking and trying to walk and you said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do it again. I’m not a cartoon character.” But you went back to bed because you didn’t want to deal. Not that you were scared. You didn’t feel like dealing with it then. And when you woke up and you called the nurse line and you still didn’t want to go, the way you bargained was to say, “I can’t go. I’ve got my Grinch pajamas on. They’ll get blood on them or mess them up somehow.” And that’s what you used to bargain until she convinces you that they won’t do anything unless you tell them to take your Grinch pajamas off. Because that’s the way that you face everything. You’re the Terminator, you don’t need anyone. So when you ask for help and no one answers, silence screams louder than anything on this planet that can possibly make the noise.

That is why the blog broke for a while after The Bell Jar. I broke for a while after The Bell Jar. Because of someone I once cared about. Because of someone I think maybe now could’ve been that person. And no matter how you want to put it, when you’re in the shadows and when you’re alone and when no one comes to put their arms around you and just tell you it’s going to be okay… it hurts. It wasn’t because the book was too heavy. It was because the book demanded something from me. It asked me to look at the places where this fucking world still hasn’t changed. It asked me to look at the places where I still haven’t changed. It asked me to go to the places that were always there…who then failed me at my lowest when I needed them the most.

V. Seeing my name on a tombstone

If The Bell Jar was the manual for how a person collapses under the weight of the world that refuses to see them, Pedro Páramo is the map of what happens after the collapse. It is a novel built out of graves, out of whispers, out of voices that should not be speaking, but do. It is a book where the dead talk more clearly than the living. Something I can certainly feel so profoundly now more than I ever thought I would or could understand. It is a book where the shadows are not symbols, but very clearly characters.

And it fits perfectly into the question we have been asking all along: what happens when people go looking for the darkness? Because in Pedro Páramo, the protagonist does exactly that. He goes searching for a father he never knew, and instead he finds a town full of ghosts. He finds out that sometimes the thing you’re searching for is the thing that destroys you. Pedro Páramo is one of those books that feels simple until you try to explain it. It expects you to follow it into the dark without bringing a flashlight and without any humor.

VI. The graveyard of voices

Pedro Páramo is one of those books that feels simple until you try to explain it. Then you realize there is no simple way to describe a novel where the dead talk, the living barely exist, and time folds in on itself like a crumpled piece of paper. It is a book that refuses to behave. It is a book that expects you to follow it into the dark.

The story begins with a promise. A son goes to find his father. But in Pedro Páramo, the promise is already broken before the journey even begins. The father is dead. The town is dead. The only thing still alive is the memory of what happened, and even that is decaying. Comala is a place where the past never left. It sits on top of the present like a weight. The people who once lived there are trapped in their own stories, repeating them, whispering them, confessing them, unable to move on.

It becomes a graveyard of voices. Every chapter is another ghost telling you what happened or what they think happened. The truth is scattered across the pages like bones. You have to piece it together yourself. You have to listen to the dead and decide which ones are telling the truth even when it hurts. Pedro Páramo himself is barely a character in the traditional sense. He’s a shadow that stretches across the entire book. He is the reason the town died. The novel shows you the aftermath of destruction—the echo of it. The residue.

VII. The story of consequences

The deeper you move into Comala, the more you realize that Pedro Páramo is not a story about ghosts. It’s a story about consequences. Every voice you hear is the result of something someone did, or didn’t do, or refused to see. The town is dead because the people in it were trapped in the orbit of one man’s power, and the novel forces you to listen to the aftermath. The residue of cruelty. The echo of choices that can’t be undone. The silence that registers when no one arrives to help.

Comala is a place where time doesn’t move forward. It loops. It repeats. The dead tell their stories over and over because they never got to finish them while they were alive. They confess, they complain, they whisper, they accuse. And the protagonist, who arrives expecting answers, finds only fragments. He finds pieces of a truth that no one person can tell. He finds a town where everyone knows part of the story but no one knows all of it.

And that is the brilliance of the novel. It refuses to give you a single narrator you can trust. Instead, it gives you a chorus of voices, each one carrying a piece of the truth, and it asks you to assemble the story yourself. It asks you to understand that the dead are not speaking for entertainment. They are speaking because they were never heard when they were alive.

This is where the book ties back to everything we’ve been exploring. In Lie Down in Darkness, the shadows came for the characters whether they wanted them or not. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the shadows were surreal. In The Secret History, the characters went looking for the shadows on purpose. In A Separate Peace, the shadows were already forming long before adulthood. In The Bell Jar, the shadows were internal, suffocating, and personal. Pedro Páramo is what happens when the shadows become the world itself. When the darkness is not metaphorical but literal. When the consequences of one person’s actions ripple outward until they swallow an entire town.

VIII. What do we carry back?

By the time we reached the end of this journey, after the shadows, after the collapse, after the ghosts, after the graves, the question we started with has changed. We began by asking what happens when the shadows come for you. Then we asked what happens when you go looking for them. Then we asked what happens when they get inside you. Then we asked what happens when the world itself becomes the shadows. But now, at the end, the question becomes something else entirely: what do we carry with us when we walk back out?

Every book in this series has left something behind. Lie Down in Darkness left the weight of inherited pain. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle left the surreal reminder that the subconscious is not a place you can visit without consequences. The Secret History left the truth that beauty and destruction often walk hand in hand. A Separate Peace left the ache of innocence cracking under pressure. The Bell Jar left the map of a mind under siege. Pedro Páramo left the echo of a world where the dead speak louder than the living.

And together, they form a single arc. A single descent. A single exploration of what it means to live with shadows, to seek them, to fear them, to understand them, and to be shaped by them. Literature matters because it shows us the parts of ourselves we don’t always want to see. It shows us the shadows we pretend aren’t there. It shows us the wounds we thought had healed. It shows us the ghosts we carry. It shows us the graves we walk over without realizing it. It shows us when the world gives us back nothing but 19 straight weeks of silence. It shows us the places where we break, but also the places we refuse to break.

Epilogue: The window was badly cracked, but it didn’t shatter

Each book demanded a different tone. Each book demanded a different version of me. Serious. Surreal. Playful. Mocking. Collapsed. And now: raw, messy, haunted. Reader-Response tells us that a book becomes what we bring to it. And what I brought to these books was 19 weeks of exhaustion, collapse, humor, anger, grief, curiosity—making me stay longer than I intended to, but with the stubborn refusal to look away from the dark. They spoke back. They shaped the writing. They shaped the tone.

So now, at the end of this piece, we step back from the shadows. Not because they’re gone, but because we’ve listened. Because we’ve walked through the darkness and come out with something we didn’t have before. A map. A manual. A chorus of voices. A reminder that the shadows are not always the enemy. Sometimes they are the story.

As I have long wandered the desert, writing has been my salvation and my sanctuary. And it will continue to be so. When I planned and launched this blog, it was always my hope to get to the point where I could do it more than once a week. I answered the bell as best as I could until The Bell Jar ripped at me and knocked me to my knees. But I shall answer despite being alone. I’m not fucking going anywhere. It was always my intention to do the blog in a sort of cycle format to have various books lead into the next.

So I’m proud to announce that the blog is moving to twice a week every Tuesday and every Friday. It may sound odd after going dark, but not really. Writing has always been my salvation and I choose to lean in rather than disappear. To not become just another haunted voice you heard from the graveyard.

If you read this far, if you’re out there, nothing’s going to change. If you’ve read this far you know we don’t swap Pinterest recipes in these parts. Fo r those interested: I reread these books for each piece and I go through multiple versions. I am a writer. This one clearly is going to be more raw than any of the others, but it’s more necessary. I’m also going to begin announcing at the beginning of the month the plans for what I’ll be doing for each month, so on Friday, I’ll be announcing what I’ll be covering for the next Tuesdays and Fridays through the end of the month. Although, you’ll be pleased to know a bit more humor is on the horizon.

I appreciate it greatly—especially if you’ve stuck with me. If you’re out there and you have stuck around I’m greateful, it means more than you know. Doing this has been a total enjoyment for me. I hope maybe for a few folks out there too.

I will see you all on Friday when we cover Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming. The new cycle of the blog as we move into a different direction, but continue tracking the inner landscape and those pesky shadows with our flashlight as we always have.

And my window is dirty and badly cracked. But when I look out through it I can still just make out something. It’s saying:

Onward.

---

The Saturday Night Live Cold Open.

This blog began by stating we’d be walking through the darkest of shadows, but with a flashlight to lead the way and a bit of humor to make the unsettling darkness a bit easier to navigate. In our first book, Lie Down in Darkness, we detailed the blog’s concepts. Fiction gives us windows. The windows allow us to look through different places and see different things—to stare at different possibilities and to look into different minds. But sometimes they also give us reflections, and serve as mirrors for ourselves. That’s why the spot here is called The Inner Landscape, and that’s what we dwell on here in this particular realm.

Styron’s book was a tough one but necessary. It was our foundation—the map we’d be using throughout our journey. Then we moved on to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where we still had windows, but they served as a trap door. For those who had begun the journey with us and wondered where our humor was, you were reminded that this journey is always rocky, and sometimes we might stumble, which will leave a few scars. We can make the walk through the shadows with a flashlight more bearable and survivable, but it is still the dark.

The next book, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, sought out a new land—one where we didn’t have the darkness trying to seek us out, but what happened when someone actually purposely sought it out on their own by design. Tartt’s book, a masterful Gothic haunting through the colleges of the eighties, definitely turned out not pretty, despite claiming to be viewing the picturesque. So then we wondered if we could get to people that had a potential to be consumed by darkness—what would happen getting to them before their innocence was entirely lost? We looked at John Knowles‘ A Separate Peace.

We’re going to continue to hunt and seek out the darkest of shadows, carrying our flashlight and trying to find moments of amusement. But now we return to those not hunting shadows willingly, and are diving down to the most deepest of levels. By circling back to Lie Down in Darkness, where Peyton Loftis jumped out the window seeking to fly.

It’s time to look at Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar to see if it’s truly possible, when haunted by shadows: is it always the decision to jump out the window yourself. Or is it possible to be pushed?

Part One: The appliance joke.

At the end of last week’s post, I spent time betting against myself on whether I could avoid a household appliance joke. But Sylvia Plath herself makes that a losing wager. Writing about her is like trying to repair a 1953 Frigidaire while the kitchen is on fire and the manual is written in code. In the world of The Bell Jar, women were expected to be as functional and silent as a toaster—plugged in, polished, and ready to pop out a perfect slice of domestic bliss on command. But Plath wasn’t a toaster; she was a high-voltage industrial engine forced into a breadbox. By the time we get to her New York City internship, the Golden Girl mask isn’t just cracking—its short-circuiting.

Part Two: The encroaching sunset.

I also stated last week: can a writer know too much about their source material? Usually, I like to let the work speak for itself for two reasons. One, academics can go too far—take a college literature course to find out if you have any questions about that. Discover how trees have bizarre meanings or clothes worn have intended meanings no person can foresee. On the other hand, as a writer who sometimes likes to posit thoughts and questions in their work, I can be mystified by what people don’t see, as well as what they think they do.

With Sylvia Plath, the work and the woman are so tangled up it is impossible to pull one string without unraveling the other. For the first time on the blog, we’re going to perform multiple autopsies—diving into the airless rooms of The Bell Jar while simultaneously looking at the life of the woman who wrote it, testing the theory that sometimes knowing the truth behind the fiction makes the story even more haunting. And then we’re going to turn the flashlight out completely. Or maybe we’ll actually train it on ourselves.

Part Three: It was a man’s man’s world, and it still is.

It is one of history’s great ironies that Sylvia Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, spent decades trying to curate her ghost and manage her memory, only to find himself relegated to the role of a footnote in her legacy. He was the established star of the time, the one with the titles and the traditional power, writing those important man-works of poetry. The truth today is that nobody cares jack shit of his work. There is only the persistent, ugly rumor that Hughes did more than just curate Plath’s final days; he performed his own brand of surgical editing on her journals to ensure his side of the story—that masculine, sweaty male version—was the only one that survived.

While it’s true that no one is responsible for another person’s suicide—you can’t pull the trigger or turn the gas dial for someone else—you can certainly spend a lifetime making the air inside the The Bell Jar unbreathable. He might have spent his nineties as a Poet Laureate, but in the court of public memory, he’s been demoted to a dustbin. He tried to hide the truth in the oven with her, but the cream always rises, and Plath’s voice is the only one we still hear ringing.

Trigger warning: It’s time to pull off the bandaid.

Part Four: The blog point where we’re hitting the mental illness, wandering the dark desert part.

We can’t talk about Plath without talking about the exit door she eventually took.

As someone who has lived in the shadows of that particular geometry, I can tell you that suicide is rarely the lightning bolt people think it is. It’s more like a slow leak. It’s the result of an environment where the clinical air has become unbreathable.

I once knew a woman who handed me a complete instruction manual. But I wasn’t equipped or able to read it at that time or in that particular moment. It was a trilogy—her own map of sorts—one of structure and safety. She was laying out a request for total power: a TPE dynamic that I simply didn’t have in me the necessary power to give or understand at that specific instance. Looking back at it now, through the airless rooms of Sylvia Plath’s world, I finally see it for what it was. It wasn’t about sex or wanting obsessive, dominant control. It was structure, it was certainty, it was a promise: just the moments of needing to be on the couch with someone’s arm around them that spoke more volumes than any words: you’re safe with me, and I’ll keep out the world’s dangers and, most importantly, I’ll keep out the darkness. It was about an anchor.

When the depression is heavy enough, the world becomes darkly bizarre: both claustrophobic and terrifyingly loose. Some people seek out a human being to become that frame. They seek a total power exchange, not out of a desire for subservience, but out of a desperate need to outsource their very own survival. They want someone else to take the wheel because they can no longer trust their own hands to steer. But here is the tragic geometry of the missed signal: you cannot be a harbor for someone else if you’re still a ship searching for the seafloor yourself, waves lapping over the sides from a violent, unyielding storm

Part Five: Missed signals.

Plath’s search for her own anchor didn’t start with Ted Hughes. It started with The Colossus. She had spent her career trying to reconstruct the ruined statue of her father, spending her days with gluepots and Lysol, trying to patch the cracks of a man who had been gone for decades. She was looking for a monument to own her reality. When she met Hughes, she thought she had finally found a living version of that statue—a Colossus who could provide the total power required to keep the Bell Jar from dropping entirely. But you can’t build a life inside the ear of a statue, and you certainly can’t find safety in a someone who is as broken as the very ruins you’re trying to escape.

The difference between survival and the descent often comes down to who is in the room with you. Plath had Dr. Gordon—a silk-tied specialist who didn’t listen and told her to buy new shoes while her world was turning gray. I’ve been thinking a lot about that contrast for this essay. When I look at a note I recently received from someone at my clinic. It was not a dismissive, simplistic statement of the shallow, but a handwritten reminder that I have a family there who enjoys seeing me on my good days but, ever more so importantly, wants me to know I can lean on them with total trust during the bad ones. One is a catalyst for the vacuum; the other a strong tether to the world.

Part Six: It’d be so great to have had more Plath writing, and also, if only I had known…

Sylvia Plath didn’t have a tether. She had a Colossus that crumbled in a world that wanted her to be a toaster. But she left us with a vital and important work of literature. The Bell Jar serves as a warning and must and should be read by all. It’s a surgical report from the inside of a short-circuiting brain, but more importantly, a short-circuiting life.

We owe it to her to read it—all of us. It’s a manual she left behind, even if it makes some of us bleed out much more deeply than others to do so.

Next Time: Must we take these looks into our own shadows? Indeed. For if we don’t, and we let the shadows swallow us—whether we may think by the hands of others or by our own—we will realize we eventually end up in our own actual graveyard. Next time, we look at Juan Rulfo and Pedro Páramo.

We move. We must. We march:

Onward.

(The Inner Landscape is taking a short break. Weekly posts will finally(!) resume April 24)

Intro: The Saturday Night Live Cold Open

Boy, did we need a break this week. The last three books were massive undertakings—the kind of reading that leaves you blinking at the wall afterward, wondering why you voluntarily buried yourself in this psychic sludge.

It started with William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, a book so deeply dark and airless it practically required a miner’s helmet. Then we followed Toru Okada down into his well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the drip-drip-drip of the void becomes its own desolate soundtrack. Finally, because apparently we weren’t done courting the abyss, we wandered into The Secret History. In these books, darkness isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s a vocation.

To lighten things up this week, we needed something a little easier—to see if we could survive with someone who wasn’t damaged before they got to college. So we’re going to look at high school. But of course, it’s literature, and you’re visiting this specific location, so it’s clearly not going to turn out well. It doesn’t. Let’s look at John Knowles’s A Separate Peace.

Part I: Can you mow around cows?

People seem to forget what happens in childhood—the little battles that go on and on, occurring daily. They forget, especially if they were introverted in middle school, the feeling of being picked up by a larger kid with one hand just so he could open the locker with the other and shovel you inside. Eventually, it all fades away. They forget the magazines sitting under their beds that their parents weren’t particularly fond of, either. Everybody eventually reaches an age where they start looking at kids out the window and opening it just to scream—not “Nice catch,” but “Get the hell off my lawn!”

It’s some kind of strange, bizarre age amnesia. Or maybe it’s just the shell adulthood forms around you, whether things go great or not. Even if things go perfectly—you marry that girl you adored in high school, move out West with her, start a ranch with cows, have the 2.5 kids, and are deliriously happy—even you will eventually open the window, see a bunch of kids, and yell: “Get away from my cows! You look a bit drunk and I don’t want you tipping them.”

It’s just a part of life. People forget that everyone had these little battles. Sometimes they’re “stuck-in-a-locker” battles, but sometimes they’re battles with what’s inside. Forgetting them, however, is what leads you to Doom.

Part II: Yes, Jane Austen would be much more fun.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—and no, I’m not playing a practical joke; we’re not going to be talking about Jane Austen and having a blast—that readers prefer first-person narrators. They like someone telling them the story. But that’s a trap, one that talented writers use to their benefit. We learned last week that while Richard in The Secret History admitted he was a murderer, almost everything else he told us afterward was a lie. Here, Gene is giving us directions, but we have to ask: how truthful is he being?

At the beginning of the novel, he is afraid of visiting two places. John Knowles, as we will discover, is not the most subtle writer. Gene is afraid of a tree—a tree that holds the weight of the one in the Garden of Eden—and some marble steps. He hasn’t been physically harmed by either, but they set the dynamic: physical versus mental, inner versus outer.

Gene is the academic, the introverted reader. Finny is the athlete. We don’t know, based on Gene’s account, whether Finny ignores his academics because he’s uninterested or if he’s simply not good at them. Like everyone, Finny wants a best friend, but he wants that friend to do what he wants to do. They can be friends, but it’s going to be difficult if one doesn’t “give.” Unfortunately, one of them does—Gene—and that “giving” happens entirely within his own mind.

Part III: Maybe Tiffany was right and thinking “I Think We’re Alone Now” would be better.

Gene and Finny manage to get along because Gene never challenges him. He never says, “Wait, I want to stop and read.” Why Gene never simply asks for time to study, we don’t know. But in one way, we should be thankful he doesn’t—otherwise, this already slim novel would have been a short story.

Gene is trying to be helpful; even introverts want friends. But his submission is like when your partner pokes you and says, “Put the book down and watch the show with me,” or a doctor pokes you to fill out forms in the waiting room, or your partner pokes you while you’re reading in bed and says, “Let’s have sex now.” You can say no, but your relationship isn’t going to end well. So Gene wants to keep reading, but he puts the book down and does exactly what Finny wants.

Two events define the early days. The first is Blitzball—the stupidest game ever created, even in fiction, because it has no rules. You just throw a ball and tackle people, but nobody who wants the ball actually gets it, and the people who get the ball don’t want it. As I mentioned, Knowles isn’t being subtle: it’s telling us something much larger. We’ll get back to that.

The other event is the tree. All kids like climbing trees, but here, instead of biting the Apple, they decide to reach for it themselves. There is definitely going to be a fall. They form the Suicide Club, the most ironically named club in literature. Nobody will end up killing themselves in it—at least not yet, and not technically. But two people will die by their own hands in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Part IV: What was it that INXS meant about “Suicide Blonde”?

The Suicide Club becomes popular, but it cuts deep into Gene’s study time. So does assisting Finny with his non-academic endeavors. Then Finny breaks the school swimming record when only the two of them are at the pool, and he doesn’t want to tell anyone. Gene finds this fascinating—and terrifying. Is it deep, selfless admiration? Or is it like Henry in The Secret History, saving Richard’s life just to bond with him while actually ensnaring him in a trap? Gene chooses the latter. He suspects sabotage.

This is where the unreliable narrator comes in handy. One person might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex because they love me.” Another might say, “My partner wants to cuddle after sex just so I can’t get back to my book.” Does Finny actually want Gene to do well, or is he so wrapped up in his own inner world that he doesn’t have Gene’s best interests at heart?

In the end, it doesn’t matter, because John Knowles is a huge fan of An American Tragedy—just like me. So, let’s talk about that, shall we?

Part V: Did he or didn’t he? Talk about your cheating!

In An American Tragedy, Clyde Griffiths is obsessed with escape. Raised in a poor, religious family, he eventually stumbles upon a sweet young girl who finds him infectious; they become intimate. Then he meets a rich girl who plays a bit of cat-and-mouse with him, eventually inviting him into her world of wealth and illusion.

When the poor girl informs him she’s pregnant, Clyde’s new world is threatened. He takes her out on a boat with the clear intention to kill her—but things go awry. Did he actually mean to do it? Or did he try to save her when the boat rocked? The brilliance is that you can argue both ways. Despite critics claiming Theodore Dreiser was a “bad” writer from a technical perspective—An American Tragedy is often called the greatest “badly written” novel in existence—he manages to ask the hard question: Once Clyde took her out on that boat, was he already morally bankrupt?

Knowles achieves the same thing. Gene makes the branch move. Does Finny fall accidentally because the branch is rocking? We don’t know, even with Gene telling us. That is the first-person narrator at work. Just because someone tells us something doesn’t mean they know the truth themselves; we only have their interpretation. All we know is that it was an impulsive act. We don’t know how much Gene meant to harm him. What matters is that the branch rocked, Gene was holding the tree, and Finny fell.

Part VI: Who knows? Who cares? Actually, it is kind of important.

Gene visits Finny and tries to apologize, but Finny pushes it away. In his world, his best friend couldn’t possibly have meant to hurt him. The remainder of the book follows Gene feeling morally culpable for the “accident.” Summer turns to fall, and the novel matches the season, becoming colder and more brittle.

Brinker Hadley enters, insisting on order and discipline. Finny demands that Gene “take up the banner” for him regarding sports and begins training him for the Olympics. It’s a shared delusion—a way for Gene to do penance and for Finny to avoid the truth. They grasp each other in a massive bear hug because they know that if they release it, they’ll both be destroyed by the reality of the situation.

Meanwhile, the war is raging on.

You do remember there’s a war going on, right?

Part VII: I really could use an antidepressant.

For the first and only time in the novel, Knowles attempts humor. It’s the one thing he hasn’t unveiled up to this point. He also seems to be a fan of the Catch-22 logic. He sends Leper Lepellier—the school’s gentle outlier—off to the war after the boy sees a recruitment film for the ski troops. You might actually laugh in a way you wouldn’t have earlier in the novel, simply because Knowles doesn’t usually “do” humor. Even if the author meant it seriously, it’s so bizarre that it reads as a dark joke dropping out of nowhere.

This leads us into the arrival of deep winter. There is a brief respite before the damage starts to unravel: the Winter Carnival, a simple, shared world of joy and rebellion. But then it turns bitter. The sense of humor vanishes, and the telegram arrives: I have escaped and I need help.

Tell me about it.

When Gene visits Leper, we get a clear indication of the society they live in. It’s still pretty much the same society Knowles was writing about back then. Leper is mentally unraveling, seeing hallucinations. The military wants to dismiss him under Section 8. While technically a discharge for mental illness, society at that time viewed it as making a man “unemployable.” It was essentially worse than a dishonorable discharge. Violating military rules or committing a war crime—which would bring you a trial—was somehow seen as less problematic than having mental health issues as a result of the war. Talk about your Catch-22.

It feels like things haven’t really changed that much. But thankfully, they have. Mental health issues are much more appreciated now and supported without stigma. I mean… aren’t they?

---

Part VIII: I messed up, you’re messed up. Everybody’s messed up in this place.

Leper accuses Gene of being a “savage underneath”—an irony coming from a kid who spent the war looking at beaver dams. But Gene can’t face that truth. Like the characters in The Secret History, he has a moral rot. Once more, we reach the place where “the center cannot hold.” It hasn’t gone well in the previous three books, and it doesn’t here, either.

Brinker pushes for a reckoning—a ridiculous kangaroo trial in the assembly room. Gene’s denial collapses, and with it, Finny’s ability to accept the fall as an accident. Finny storms out, falls on the marble stairs, and re-breaks his leg.

In the infirmary, his haunting “Why?” echoes throughout the novel. That question penetrates everything. We discover that when dealing with the shadows, those questions are all too common. You realize then that Finny wasn’t competing; sports were just his way of trying to keep living.

In this moment, the term “Blood Brothers” has never meant more.

Part IX: Blitzball is still a stupid fucking game.

Finny goes into surgery to repair the fracture, and bone marrow slips into his heart. The less-than-subtle Knowles has returned: Finny dies, bringing a new, literal meaning to the term “Blood Brothers.” The war finally arrives at Devon—which is what the novel was actually about all along. Just like that stupid Blitzball game, there are no winners and no losers. Not in war, not in mental illness, and sometimes, not even in friendship.

Brinker’s father arrives to lecture the boys—one of the great irritants in literature—having fully succumbed to the Age Amnesia mentioned earlier with his absurd dictations on “honor.” The boys have already learned that Gene’s war with Finny was pointless.

No survivor can ever allow themselves to be swallowed up completely by the shadows. It always ends in destruction.

Next Week: we’ll find out that keeping things “light” doesn’t make it any easier to walk through the darkness. We’ll see what happens when a novelist knows a bit too much about their source material as we look at Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. We’ll see if I can get through the entire essay without making an appliance joke.

Really, what are the odds?

Onward.

The Saturday Night Live cold open:

Two weeks ago, in Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton took our hand and walked us straight into the long night’s ruin, swallowed whole by the dark. Last week, in The Wind‑Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami tried to keep us in the daylight for as long as possible — first with spaghetti, then with twelve‑step ironing, dictating each motion like a monk. But still, we lost our footing and tumbled into a well, listening to the slow, indifferent drip of water in the dark around us.

At some point, you start to wonder whether the darkness is hunting us — but, even more terrifying, what happens when someone starts sending love letters to the dark. Which is why today we turn to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a novel where beauty and rot are lovers, and where the descent isn’t a mistake but a calling.

Part One: Cool, You Killed Someone. Now What?

If we’d been able to witness Jay Gatsby in his college years, he might have emerged as Richard Papen. Gatsby wanders into his illusions like a man sleepwalking; Richard sprints toward his, arms wide, begging the dream to embrace him back. He wants the glamour, the brilliance, the curated strangeness. He wants to be devoured by it entirely.

The novel begins with Richard confessing to murder, then immediately pivoting into a litany of complaints about his youth. It’s a familiar pose. We’ve heard it before. Strip them both down to their bare essentials and Gatsby and Richard share one single truth:

They are both exquisitely, almost artistically, assholes.

Donna Tartt asks an awful lot of her reader right out of the gate. To open a 500-page behemoth of a debut novel by casually confessing to murder requires a staggering amount of structural confidence. In a way, it is the exact inverse of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Where Murakami made us wade through pages of mundane spaghetti-boiling and shirt-ironing before slowly peeling back the dread, Tartt sits the reader down on the opening page and ties them to a chair. Then she shows them the bloody knife and says, Now that you’re here, let’s talk about how we got here.

This is the great risk of the “whydunit” versus the “whodunit.” Standard mysteries rely on the cheap adrenaline of the reveal. By stripping that away instantly, Tartt bets the entire 500 pages on the psychological destruction of her characters. She isn’t writing a modern thriller. She is writing a Greek tragedy in tailored suits, where the descent isn’t a mystery—it’s an absolute inevitability.

First, we get Richard’s backstory, and it is revealed with one long, enormous sigh. He’s from California, complaining endlessly about his parents and his desperation to escape his father’s business. He spends two years at a local college—which, frankly, sounds like a perfectly healthy environment, even if they didn’t teach ancient Greek. But Richard picks up a knack for the language, and Greek becomes his escape hatch into something better. He seeks to entirely erase his past existence and speaks admirably of the reinvention. Though, the reader begins to wonder: if only he had actually paid attention to the literature instead of just the language. If Richard had just stumbled across Medea and understood what Greek tragedy actually entails, Donna Tartt wouldn’t have had a book.

This is where Tartt pulls off her greatest sleight of hand. Richard is technically a reliable narrator because he has already confessed to the murder. We trust him because he told us the worst thing upfront. But with every single breath he takes, we begin to realize he is completely unreliable in everything else. He is utterly blind to the fact that his life is racing toward an intersection. The stoplight definitely isn’t green, and it sure isn’t yellow—it is pulsing a bright, blood red. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to better your life; it’s a standard literary engine. But we immediately see within the first few pages that Richard lacks the basic moral guardrails to keep this train on the tracks. We want to reach inside the novel and strangle him.

It isn’t just the murder confession on page one that makes us uncomfortable; it’s the way Richard thinks. By the time he actually arrives at Hampden College, we are already deeply unsettled. We watch him obsess over the most insignificant things—the aesthetics of a tailored coat, the cold brilliance of an expensive pen—and we really want to scream, What is wrong with you? But of course, we can’t stop him. The deed is already done in the opening sentence.

When an author has you in the palm of her hand like that, she gets to do whatever she wants to you. For the next 500 pages, Tartt does exactly that. She drags us through the Greek rituals, letting us hear the Greek chorus in the background, the blood in the Vermont forest, and the company of staggeringly self-important students. At the end of it all, the characters bizarrely will be the only ones who won’t seem to care about the horror they brought to bear. But you, the reader, will feel very, very dirty.

After closing the book, your first immediate thought will be the need for a shower.

Part Two: Can You Please Mind Your Own Business?

It is entirely fitting that the moment Richard actually lays eyes on the Greek students, his fate is already sealed. Sure, we are going to get all the lurid details of the murder and the rituals later, but anyone paying attention to how pathetic and distressed Richard’s inner life is at the beginning can see the trap snap shut the second he sees them.

If books had lightbulbs, you could see one flash over Richard‘s head. He spent his entire youth desperate to escape the closed, suffocating circle of his California family, running away at warp speed the first chance he got. He hates closed circles. But the moment he arrives at Hampden, he realizes that simply getting to the expensive private college—hiding the financial aid forms, lying about his background, faking his history, faking the aesthetic of wealth—isn’t enough for him. Just being on campus doesn’t cure his imposter syndrome. There’s still the tenacious belief inside that he doesn’t belong and, more importantly, that he doesn’t matter.

Then he sees the Greek students. They are the ultimate closed circle. They are wealthy, eccentric, and entirely isolated from the rest of the school.

This is what immediately captivates Richard and lures him into destruction. It eats at him. He can’t just be happy at a private college reading books, learning, and spending time with the friends he claims he has. Once he sees that inner sanctum, the education becomes entirely irrelevant. He must possess the exclusivity. He must attain the circle, because only then will he truly belong.

He looks at a group of arrogant, detached, wildly damaged kids, and his only thought is: So clearly, I have no choice but to find a way to join them.

And then we meet the architect and master of the closed circle: Julian Morrow

Part Three: My God, More Lord of the Rings?

Julian is one of the most fascinating, insidious creatures in modern literature. If you knocked on the door of a Hobbit hole and a creature poked his head out who could fluently teach ancient Greek, that would be Julian. He’s the ultimate gatekeeper at Hampden College, guarding his hand-picked students like a dragon keeping its gold safe in a cave.

But structurally, he’s the exact inverse of golden Gandalf. When Gandalf knocks on your door and leads you out of the Shire and down a dark, terrifying journey, it’s ultimately for your own good. You’re going to save the world, build your character in the process, and be able to face the ultimate reality.

When this dastardly little Greek hobbit takes you down a dark journey, it is entirely to escape reality. He isolates his students, feeds their arrogance, and encourages them to lose their minds in ancient rituals just to see if they can. Gandalf leads you through the dark to get you home safely. Julian pours the Kool-Aid himself. He leads you into the dark, convinces you the rot is actually beautiful, and leaves you there for a much more disastrous, bloody ending.

Part Four: Perhaps the Fact He Seemed Like a Prick Should’ve Been Your First Clue.

Richard’s entry into the Greek class happens by a kind of selective accident-non-accident. Anyone who has been ensconced in reading Greek tragedy knows there are always “accidents” that are actually fate springing a trap for you. For Richard, the trap is stumbling upon the weirdly incestuous twins in the library and helping them translate a passage with which they’re struggling.

And then in comes Henry Winter, the self-appointed, staggeringly arrogant leader of the group, who gives Richard a patronizing “good job” and immediately dismisses him. His cold calculation, demonstrated not with subtlety but outright hostility, could have been something Richard might have picked up on—and clearly should have picked up on. But instead, the harsh, curt dismissal hooks directly into Richard’s deep insecurities and crawls under his skin. It acts as a parasitic infection that attaches to his body and can only be cured with entrance into the circle. He is now desperate to be let in, and it must be so. Otherwise, he can’t be cured.

And then, of course, there is Bunny.

Bunny is the weirdest character of all. And that is quite a statement when dealing with a novel where a desperate young man covets entry into an inner sanctum, and where the centerpiece of the plot is a literal bacchanal in the forest. Yet Bunny comes across as the weird one. We already know he gets killed—which makes him interesting right off the bat—but he is also morbidly, exquisitely annoying. As you read, you will catch yourself thinking: Frankly, I’m glad they killed you. I would have, too. I don’t like you either. He is the ultimate grifter. He is that horrible friend who attaches himself to you every time you announce a visit to a restaurant, and then eats, and eats, and eats some more. Just as the bill is brought to the table, he excuses himself to the bathroom and sneaks out the back door. Honestly, who hasn’t secretly wanted to kill the dine-and-dash friend?

But herein lies the great irony of The Secret History. The problem isn’t just that Bunny is an obnoxious mooch. The problem is that Bunny is the only one in the group who actually sees the real world.

He doesn’t take the Greek rituals seriously. He knows the entire thing is just a wealthy, pretentious cosplay game. He sees the absolute hideousness of what they are doing and what they are capable of. He is the only one who isn’t completely wrapped up and hypnotized by Julian‘s cult of beauty. But in a group that demands absolute devotion to the illusion—as all cults must—the one guy pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is the one who has to die.

Part Five: If Only You Had Bought a Coat.

Richard’s desperation to belong to this closed circle is so absolute that it nearly kills him long before the murder even happens. Over the winter break, because he has nowhere else to go and refuses to admit he is broke, he ends up staying in a freezing, unheated room with a hole in the roof. He is so committed to his curated illusion of wealth, so terrified of being exposed as an imposter to the Greeks, that he would literally rather freeze to death in a brutal Vermont winter than ask for help.

And then comes the rescue from the absolute last person you would expect. Henry Winter—the cold, calculating, staggeringly arrogant leader of the pack—is the one who finds him, rescues him, and takes him to the hospital, saving his life.

It’s a brilliant, terrifying psychological trap on Tartt’s part. Henry has never before demonstrated being the type to care if someone freezes to death. In fact, one theorizes he would find it somehow aesthetically poetic. But importantly, by saving Richard’s life, Henry binds him forever. Richard is now not just a hanger-on; he’s indebted. He owes Henry. Everyone else would feel the exact same way. However, such things are problematic when the one you’re indebted to happens to be a sociopath. Now Richard has a switch he carries around on his chest just waiting for Henry to activate it. And clearly, obviously, naturally—this is literature, and you’re in the sweet spot of this blog—it’s going to be pushed at the worst possible moment.

But now it’s time to take a break and talk of horror films. Because why not.

Part Six: Donna Tartt Has a Massive Crush on Leatherface.

There are numerous horror films about people who go into the woods. They go into the woods to camp. They go into the woods to have sex. They go into the woods to camp and have sex. And of course, there are plenty of monsters one always stumbles upon in the woods.

If you’re not in a truly dark horror film where absolutely no one gets out alive—and by the way, congratulations if you are, because you’re probably watching an independent horror film and the world could use many more of those because their often the best—then at least one person makes it back from the group. Sometimes two, a male and a female, if they’re aiming for the younger crowd. But everybody else just gets gutted, shredded, and killed rapidly, and depending on how much special effects money was available to the studio, graphically. Everybody gets left behind in the forest a bloody carcass.

Look at The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a particular example. Poor Sally runs for the last fifteen minutes of the film. Screaming. No, literally, the last fifteen minutes are her screaming continuously. For justifiable reasons—you would too if an individual wearing a mask made from other people’s faces was chasing you with a chainsaw to add yours to his collection. (Note: after they use your body to help with their meatpacking, which is kind of a “don’t waste anything, use everything” philosophy. It’s an ecological horror film, who knew?) She gets cut by tree limbs and scratched. She jumps out of a window, lands pretty well, and keeps running. She is determined to make it away from him and out of that forest no matter what. She is going through pure hell, both an inner and outer hell, to survive Leatherface.

When she finally makes it to the road and hops into the back of the pickup truck, we see her face as it’s pulling away, and we know everything. If we hadn’t figured it out already by what she was going through, or if you had some fond hopes that she would be okay when the credits rolled, the final shot confirms everything. The woman is going to be in therapy the rest of her life. While she is saved, she definitely is not well at all.

The Secret History is even worse. A bunch of jaded, pompous, annoying kids who think they can do anything they want by fiat—which, by the way, is also a horrible idea in horror films—wander into the forest. But the terrifying difference here is that all of them come back. And none of them were even good before they entered the forest; now they’re even worse. They are definitely not remotely okay after the events that occurred.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster: who will survive and what will be left of them?

And Donna Tartt doesn’t have a chainsaw anywhere to be found in the entire 500 pages.

Part 7: Ain’t That What Friends Are For?

After Leatherface unfortunately lets everyone escape, we have the group back from that bacchanal. They all agree, as cults do, to hide what happened—although the way things work, since they’re all rich, they probably would be able to get really good lawyers. But this is when they become a completely closed-off circle. They share this horrible secret, and anyone not involved in it is not a part of their world. The complicity they took part in, the fear they share, the claustrophobia that starts to seep in out of the secrets they are keeping.

Look at that. We’ve discovered the title of this one. Just like with Murakami, eventually, we can find out why a book is called something, even if you aren’t an English literature major. The group is sharing their secret history, but also the secret history of what they’ve done, and the representation of the twisted ecstasy of the Greeks that they were trying to attain.

The problem being, of course, since they are all now closed off together and have built an inner wall to share things with, one person is missing: Bunny. And whether or not Bunny would have gotten in on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and wanted to dine-and-dash in the forest, he knows something’s off here, and he doesn’t like it.

So, his jokes become vicious and sharp. We suddenly start to see Henry become pale and pull out of himself, while Bunny actually seems to jump to be the powerful one of the group. Which is odd, because he wasn’t even the one involved in the activity.

Henry does become the architect of the cover-up, and the others go along because they’re terrified. But they give up their complete autonomy to him just to escape any sense of responsibility for what they’ve done. Individually, they all collapse.

Charles is the first to go because he becomes a drunk. Alcohol is his coping mechanism. He is the defining instance of that very not-good term: self-medicating. I suppose when you’ve gone to the forest to re-create a Greek tragedy and come out wearing sheets of metaphorical blood, self-destruction probably does seem like a relief.

Camilla withdraws. She becomes quieter. She becomes the most emotional of the group and is basically the one you see in a film who would wake up every night from a nightmare of what they have done.

And Francis is the one most plagued by mental health issues, getting panic attacks, with the fear and the walls seemingly closing in to trap him. He is the one who actually feels the consequences and what they might mean. He is the moral guideline in a group that doesn’t have one.

The problem is, by not inviting Bunny, it’s now Bunny who’s going to have to enter the circle. And by doing so, once again, we are back exactly where we were after our first two books: we reach the point in literature, and in this blog, where the center can no longer hold. Are you starting to sense a trend?

Part 8: Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater.

Bunny is kind of a problem. We already know that. The problem is he knows something, but he doesn’t know exactly what.

Bunny is like having that friend—and it may have been a best friend—who has always told you that your partner is a piece of trash, and you’ve just always tried to ignore them. I mean, they’re a friend that you like, but you also like your partner. And then one day they walk into your house and they say, “I want you to hear this,” and they play a tape, and it’s your husband or your wife, your girlfriend or your boyfriend, and they’re having sex on the tape, and it’s not with you.

You clearly know a lot more, but you still don’t know why. And why were they fucking you over?

So Bunny, not appreciating having taken place in… well, literally, if we are kind of talking about what happened in the forest and the Dionysian kind of Greek orgy—now there’s a vision, isn’t it one?—he turns his innocence into a weapon because he doesn’t really understand what is at stake. And because everyone is so unsettled, every punch lands.

Ironically, the one who was looked down upon by the group, who was considered least worthy by the others—and frankly, with legitimate reasons in a few cases—is the one that will lead to their destruction. He’s now in a position where he can humiliate Henry, puncture Charles, really say some nasty stuff to the twins (and by the way, did I mention the twins are incestuous? It comes up at this point, but we survived Leatherface and that’s already enough, so let’s just move along), and then he begins draining Richard for money without absolutely any remorse.

And since they’re spoiled little rich brats, and they don’t want to take responsibility for what they’ve done, they start fearing him more than they do the truth. Every interaction is like a trapdoor waiting for them to fall through. But since we know what happened on the first page, now we can see it as Bunny upon the stage, the noose around his neck, and we’re thinking: Is this finally the thing that’s gonna move the floor where he hangs?

So they rationalize the unthinkable, which frankly isn’t that far, you know, when you’ve decided to play Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the forest for fun. They play more on the title: Bunny becomes the secret history they can’t keep covered.

In a sense, at least to the circle, Bunny becomes part of the Greek tragedy. His fate is simply destined. It’s a choice. He must die because he’s being pulled by his own actions of threatening to reveal what it was they had done.

It’s clear to the characters. We see them realizing it, and it’s far more inevitable—ignoring that we know what happened on the first page—long before anyone actually states it out loud.

And then Bunny is dead. If nothing else, Donna Tartt didn’t lie. She said it on the first page.

Part 9: What the Hell Did You Claim on your Taxes?

There are two problems with Julian. One: he’s an extraordinary teacher. Two: remember when the counselor told us he only took a dollar for tax purposes? He was vastly overpaid.

Julian senses something is wrong and the group is fraying at its edges, but it’s an inconvenience and an aesthetic flaw, not a moral crisis. He won’t even name it or speak of it, and he never seems to show any human emotion. He’s entirely abstract, preferring beauty to truth. Even as everything is starting to rot.

His detachment is so vile it becomes a form of brutality in itself.

He is hurt in the only way he’s willing to be—like he’s holding a snow globe that has been broken, and now the inner portion has been ruined. Not that what’s inside the snow globe mattered. But that now it’s deeply and forever cracked and unrepairable.

It’s more about the ugliness than about the loss of a student. When he finds out what happens to Bunny, he just recoils—not from any ethical feeling. And if your students go into the forest to replicate The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because of what you taught them, and you don’t feel any guilt, clearly you don’t have any ethics.

Julian‘s collapse and lack of morality is one of the most epic of any in modern American literature. He taught his students, they learned far too well, and when he sees himself in the mirror and what they’ve done, he doesn’t like the reflection. Because there’s no beauty there.

His refusal to accept responsibility howls through the book in its silence.

Julian is the father driving the family in the RV to Disney World of a sort, and he’s had far too many. He crashes it. He kills everybody else in the other car, and he flees into the night. Like any drunk driver, doing so serves as his confession.

They carry the weight of the philosophy that he was instilling into them. He builds up the world that destroys them and pretends that he was not involved. He taught them to worship beauty—or beauty of a sort—and he lays out the path and just seems offended that they marched the steps. Not devastated. He’s offended. Not heartbroken. Inconvenienced. Not guilty, just gone.

Ghosts haunt all the books that we have looked at so far. Peyton Loftis haunted William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, haunting the entire novel and finally flying out the window. Toru goes down into a well that haunts The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but it finally leads to show him the way. Here, Julian haunts The Secret History.

He floats through the novel, Richard grasping onto him for all that he offers, and then vanishes like all ghosts do. But in its place, his visage is present in every ruin left behind, while being absent from every consequence.

Julian taught about the luxury and power found in beauty. Richard Papen is right in his statement on the very first page: in this novel, beauty is very much the fatal flaw entirely.

Next week, we’re going to give ourselves a break with a slightly shorter work. But we’re going to stay on focus and see if we can catch people before they get to college. We’re going to deal with boarding schools and high schools. So you can probably imagine it’s not going to go well, or you wouldn’t be here. We’ll take a look at John Knowles’ A Separate Peace.

Onward.