Book report The Secret History by Donna Tartt. All literary aspects have been described and developed (plot, setting, theme, genre, tension, climax, point of view, characters, symbolism, irony, protagonist/antagonist, conflict) and a summary is included.
Book review English The Secret History, ISBN: 9781405529631
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Title The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Escapist/Formulaic or Escapist
Imaginative fiction?
Plot Prologue (Foreshadowing bunny’s death)
Exposition (Richard finding the brochure of Hampden college, joins Julian’s
Greek class, the vivid descriptions in Francis’ summer house in the country)
Rising action (Richard learns about the farmer Henry murdered while
Fracins, the twins and him were doing a ritual and that Bunny knows of it,
tension because Bunny is blackmailing everybody and Henry is planning to
kill him, after killing him everybody is severely paranoid, especially Charles
(drinking, sick, thinks Henry is going to kill him too), they are not found guilty
by the FBI)
Climax (after Charles disappears from the country house he comes back
with a gun to kill Henry, Henry stops him but Richard gets shot, people have
heard the gun shots and come look, Henry shoots himself in the head after
telling Camilla he loves her, as a true hero in a Greek tragedy)
Denouement (Henrys death is portrayed as a suicide, Richard is seen as
the hero who tried to stop him, the group slowly falls apart)
Conclusion (Francis tries to commit suicide, Richard, him and Camilla
come together again through his goodbye letters, Charles is not speaking
with Camilla and lives somewhere with his girlfriend from the clinic and is
unreachable)
Epilogue (denouement and conclusion)
Non-lineair time events
Flashforwards (they are not really flashforwards since the story has
already happened but richard sometimes flashes forward to elements of
bunny’s death, for instance in the prologue)
Flashbacks (the whole story is a flashback because its told in past tense
but once Richard starts to realise that they killed the farmer or that Henry
has been plotting Bunny’s death for far longer then he thought there are little
flashbacks)
Foreshadowing (there is a lot of foreshadowing about bunny’s death,
Richard mentions it literally several times)
Suspended revelation (Richard already knows the story but withholds
things he figured out but did not know at that time)
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