tsh spoilers below
my (long-winded) attempt at breaking down bunnyโs murder:
i find it vaguely frustrating when people say that they killed bunny over their Aesthetic issues when it ran a lot deeper than that. like yeah they do find him kind of repulsive for his habits but itโs about the fact they find him disrespectful. people often point to the grilled cheese and milkshake as them finding bunnyโs personality unsavoury when that was about disrespect. for the bacchnal you had to be โcleanโ this was achieved through fasting and bathing, something henry says that bunny struggled with. for bunny to be so careless about not even hiding the fact he isnโt partaking in their cleansing rituals, doing it in a space so populated as the common room was their last straw.
bunny was killed as a revenge kill more than anything. if you go by the basic categories of killers outside of sexual fantasy driven killers, bunnyโs murder falls somewhere between โcomfort-hedonistโ killers, those who kill purely for material gain, a fee, or profit (e.g black widows) as letโs be honest, they were all saving money with bunny gone or it fall into โmissionaryโ killers, those who kill for revenge, or ideological motives (e.g war criminals or those who kill prostitutes to cleanse society of them)
julianโs speech on โthe more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed,then the more he needs some method of channelling the primitive impulses he worked so hard to subdue โ in my opinion essentially boils down to a theory some neuroscientists hold called the tribune brain about how three separate parts of our brain interact with eachother, the R-complex, the limbic system and the neocortex. the R-complex is the most primitive part of the brain, and also the oldest. it exists in most species, from lizards to birds to humans and controls the instinctual self. so it controls the brainโs need to, kill, eat, reproduce and flee in the sense of danger. this is how humanโs were solely driven back in the stone age. they did not yet have art, or food they planted themselves. they were very animalistic still.
this part of the brain still very much exists today and interacts with the limbic system, this controls emotions, memories and sensory and motor functions. it recalls emotional states and motivational behaviours. these two interact with the newest part of the brain, the part that makes humans differ from other species, the neocortex, itโs a highly complex part of the brain that controls philosophical, cultural, linguistic and expressive contexts. the neocortex is largely what controls the greek class, yet as they do not have a balance like most humans do, their r-complex ends up controlling them much more in the future.
julian says that he finds romantics to often be failed classicists, this reminds me of a very romantic approach to the birth of humans by Georgian philosopher Mamardashvili who said that the human species began when one individual mourned the death of one another. a newer take on this is that humans began with fear of the death (historian and psychologist Akop Nazaretyan). this is more akin to richardโs narration. his fear of the dead (henry and bunny) controls his narration and how he tells his story. his handling of the true narrative is largely controlled by the two ghosts that haunt the narrative.
one theory on the birth of killers comes from the fact that humans were, in their primitive forms, naturally killers. we fought and ate our own species for centuries upon centuries before the development of the more modern brain and how modern society rather than making killers, unmakes them. the way we now raise children and interact with society subdues these primitive impulses that control our reptilian brains. my theory is, that with julianโs isolation with the group, he essentially rebuilt this unmaking, making murder more of a feasible possibility โa redistribution of matterโ. in their isolation the class have once more returned to the base impulse that controlled man dozens of millenniaโs ago.
iโd also say for certain that the bacchnal helped accelerate the groupโs return to this more primitive state, the way henry describes the experience of the ritual going correctly seems to reflect humans before the tribune brain, when humanโs were controlled solely by the R-complex. a lack of balances between the tribune can certainly accelerate their predeposition to murder, their brains now permanently changed.
anyway, i think the murder of bunny was largely driven by so many different factors, both in and out of the classesโ control that itโs hard to pin point exactly What set them over the edge. but isnโt it fun to break it down to something that was so against their classicist sensibilities? (psychology and science)
