in defense of bunny corcoran
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a classic murder mystery, and Bunny is the classic victim: unpalatable enough on the surface so that his killers can pretend not to miss him, claim that he had it coming, and spin excuses justifying what they did. It’s easy not to like him, easier than it is not to like the others, who are constantly romanticized and glorified through Richard’s narration– Bunny is loud, annoying, hedonistic, prejudiced, a money-waster, and above all, un-aesthetic. A simple scroll through his Tumblr tag reveals hundreds of anti-Bunny posts writing him off as the worst character in The Secret History. Yet as frustrating as he is, the fact that he wears all of his flaws on his sleeve actually makes him the most decent character in the novel.
The Secret History is about deception and delusion, and the message it conveys about hidden truths is far from flattering. The story is a scathing satire of academic elitism, revealing that the things which seem the prettiest are often the ugliest on the inside. “Beauty is terror” drives a group of rational students to commit the unspeakable; “live forever” obscures the finality and significance of wasted life. The main characters are all two-faced– Richard the voyeuristic innocent, Julian the fallible immortal– starting out with flawless facades which fall away to reveal hideous truths as the plot progresses. Camilla, the beauty, is passive; Henry, the leader, is cold; Francis, the thinker, is weak; Charles, the loyal, is vicious. Bunny is the notable exception. He has no tragic backstory or dark secret– actually, he has nothing to hide at all, because everyone already knows exactly who he is.
If Bunny has a fatal flaw, it is that he appears to be the only one capable of seeing the absurdism in The Secret History in an unromantic light: this leads him directly, though undeservedly, to his death. Everything is a joke to him, a quality which incessantly irritates his friends. He does not take Classics– their lifestyle; their raison d’etre– seriously; he makes a mockery of the form by typing his essays triple-spaced. His tweed jacket is frayed and stained; he chews pink bubble gum and has a honking laugh. Bunny’s very presence in the clique ruins its ‘dark academia’ aesthetic which Tumblr loves to glorify (entirely missing the point of the novel)– there’s a reason why he is left out of so many fan-made edits and moodboards. Even his insults are delivered tongue-in-cheek, as he starts to lash out against a fate which he knows is inescapable. Bunny dies laughing, which is perhaps the most grievous jab at the group that he was capable of delivering. They fall apart after he is gone because it is painfully clear that everything they stood for, everything they were, was a joke all along.
Bunny spirals in the weeks before his death: he’s drunk, incoherent, suffocating under the weight of being forced to keep the secret of the farmer’s murder. And, of course, he verbally attacks each member of the group, trying to get at their most sensitive weakness: Francis’s gayness, Camilla’s femininity, Richard’s poverty. He’s a deeply unpopular character primarily because of the prejudices he so openly owns– but these attacks are personal far more so than they are universal. The point is not Bunny’s homophobia or sexism– values which, it could be argued, he seems to mock or parody as he does Classics– but the fact that he feels directly threatened by his own friends. In the letter discovered late in the novel, Bunny reveals that he knew Henry was planning to kill him and that everyone else was in on it long before his actual murder. He begs for help from Julian because he knows, months in advance, that all of his so-called ‘friends’ hated him and wanted him dead. How can anyone, even someone far less flawed than Bunny, reconcile with a truth as harsh as this? He copes poorly, but his last weeks are a cry for help, not a justification for his murder.
“Bunny got what was coming for him” is a take that can be found in several different iterations online; some in jest, some not. To that I answer: those who seriously believe it are as gullible and idealistic as Richard, who allowed himself to be convinced that being annoying was a crime punishable by death. Bunny was not a killer (which is more than can be said for the rest of the characters in The Secret History): he was somebody’s brother and somebody’s son, a normal person and a life recklessly and pointlessly thrown away. His controversial honesty dismantled the Greek ideals which his ‘friends’ idolized, and for that, at least, we must value him.
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