it's so beautiful and horrible and artful the way richard's childhood abuse informs his decisions later in life. as gradually as he reveals the full details of what he went through, the influence of that experience on his thoughts is always evident.
the fact that he used to believe his dad was abusing him for a reason. that if he hit him it must have been because he'd actually done something wrong. and realizing, around age 12, that his dad's decisions were actually completely arbitrary, that every justification he gave was just an excuse, that he was completely & helplessly dependent on this man who was incompetent and who hated him and that his mom was going to do nothing at all to protect him.
and the real tragedy of it is richard wants to get out so badly. he tries to get out so badly. he fights tooth and nail to go to hampden. he even goes so far as to steal tax documents from his dad to fill out his financial aid forms. he tries. probably more than any of the others, he tries.
but he still couldn't escape the toxic thought patterns in his own mind.
he couldn't stop making decisions that were just as arbitrary as his father's. he over-corrected. he tended towards arbitrary romanticization instead of arbitrary anger, but it was still just as arbitrary.
one of the things i find so odd and intoxicating about richard's pov is how beautiful he makes everything sound. he could be talking about arts & culture or barbaric violence or a lazy sunday afternoon or the sound of the toilet flushing after he's thrown up in it or the contours of his friends' faces and he'd make it all sound equally beautiful.
but it's the equally that's the problem.
richard's tragedy is a tragedy of misplaced values.
and it's truly tragic because in many ways he's so close.
henry makes a comment at one point that richard's better than bunny because he's willing to work for his own money. that he would rather have risked freezing to death than admit to the others that he had nowhere to go over the winter.
and there's a sort of point to it. richard certainly has the best work ethic of the bunch. the only one who gets a college degree (an outcome that francis seems to find ironic even though it should have been entirely expected). the only one who works for his money. because he has to.
but richard's problem is he doesn't actually recognize his work ethic as a value. he's ashamed of his poverty, he hasn't internalized the fact that it's in no way his own fault, he hides it from the others even at risk to his own life. he glamorizes and glorifies people who most certainly don't see work ethic as a value. julian, most of all. who gives entire speeches about how ancient societies were better because everybody knew their place and nobody dared try be upwardly mobile.
and even at the very end he's still pushing the others to try (pushing francis not to marry a woman he doesn't love just for his inheritance, for example) and running into dead ends. he wanted love so immensely and at the end he's so lonely.
and you can see the same patterns of abuse in all the others. they each have varying amounts of information revealed about their past (in a way that is also very artful and ties directly into what richard chooses to focus on and what others choose to reveal to him), but they were all broken in some way at one point or another.
bunny being taught that nothing matters but money but that it's shameful to work for it. that he has to trick or shame or cajole other people into buying things for him. because his parents were members of a dying dynasty who didn't want to admit that it was dying and sent him to expensive schools without even giving him enough money to buy his textbooks.
francis being a gay man raised by homophobes. marrying a woman he doesn't love in the end because his grandfather will cut him out of the inheritance if he doesn't. richard telling him to just take care of himself and francis insisting it's not possible. richard pointing out that he does it and francis saying "but you're used to it". learned helplessness.
henry having a terrible accident in his youth that left him bedridden for years with nothing but his books. forced to live vicariously through stories. openly admits to richard that he doesn't feel a lot of emotions for other people and that his life felt dead and empty until he killed that farmer. that he liked it specifically because it allowed him to lose control. that he obsessed over the bacchanal in the first place because of that same desire to lose control. that he felt like he lived too much in his mind, felt immobilized, felt paralyzed... is it any wonder that that would be the internal state of someone who was immobilized in his youth?
he's not close to his father but he seems to believe that his father will always do what is necessary to take care of him, which implies material care or probably even excess with a lack of emotional care. out of all of them, he's probably the most obsessed with julian and definitely the one who is closest to him. he sees him as a father figure, a role model, a god. he's heartbroken when he leaves and thinks it's cowardly that he doesn't even care that they killed two people and only wants to keep his name out of it, even though he and the rest of the group also only ever wanted to make sure they get away with it.
he kills himself in the end, most likely because of what happened with julian. richard seems to think he wanted to make a big noble gesture to protect the others from the fallout of charles's attempt to kill him. the tragedy therein is he fails to actually save any of them and only leaves them haunted. if he'd stayed and actually started making an effort to improve things, he might've actually made a difference, though it may have already been too late. but he was the leader. the others followed and respected him more than anyone. he was the instigator and the one who actually physically did both murders. if anyone could have actually influenced them toward a better path, it was him. especially once julian was gone. but that would have taken a lot of work. and as charles says earlier in the book, henry winter will never work a day in his life. he chose a big gesture, a dramatic sacrifice. he had a very particular understanding of what a hero was, and it wasn't someone who put in the effort. and in the end he abandoned them just as much as julian did.
the twins have the least revealed about their past. we know that their parents died when they were so young they can barely remember them and that their dynasty seems to be running out of money too. camilla tells a story of her uncle giving her a tape measure as a toy when what she really wanted was to see her father, which seems to suggest an overall lack of familial love and support even before the deaths of their parents. we know they were in an incestuous relationship and that charles is very jealous and possessive over camilla, and eventually becomes physically abusive and even tried to kill her. the exact details of what might have lead charles to behave this way aren't as traceable as in most of the others. a key insight richard has about charles is that people often make the mistake of trying to reason with him when what he really wants is to be reassured like a child. so presumably, a lack of family support leading them towards over-reliance on each other, and insecurity and a lack of maturity on charles's part.
camilla has the least revealed about her of all the characters. we know she's the only girl in a "boy's club", as richard puts it, and richard seems to think that she has a really good attitude about it and isn't insecure or over-compensating in any way. she has the best composure of all of them, even better than henry imo. she's generally always the calmest. has the least signs of breaking down. even henry seems to be basically breaking down during bunny's funeral, just barely keeping it together through a heroic amount of effort, and francis and charles and bunny break down very completely at the end, but camilla has only very brief instances of breakdowns, like the one time she cried in front of the FBI agents, which was really rather quick. even when she cuts her foot and is bleeding a bunch and her life is very likely in danger, she doesn't cry and is unwilling even to admit that she's in pain. "she was brave," as henry put it.
richard says that he's never sure what she thinks about anything and that bunny finds her even harder to read than he does and she was almost impossible for him to psychologically terrorize like the others, except for in relation to incest with charles. then of course there's the other stuff with charles, the possessiveness and jealousy that turns into physical abuse and an attempt to kill her. but even at the worst of it, she still defends charles and says he's in a bad state and is not himself and she hopes he will get better. though they do end up no longer speaking to each other at the end. and she ends up taking care of her sick grandmother, and says she barely has a life outside of that care.
more than any of the others, she has a lot of weirdness tied into her experience of the bacchanal. the fact that she'd somehow coated her whole hair in blood but not gotten any on her clothes. the fact that she lost the ability to speak for several days after. the fact that she had memories of being a deer while the others had memories of chasing a deer. she may have actually been the most traumatized, or at least she likely had the most reason to be traumatized, but she was also the one who least showed that trauma.
so... is she rationalizing? dissociating? is she just doing what she has to to survive? it seems highly likely that she's not actually just Perfectly Fine, but it's hard to say exactly what's going on in her head specifically because of the fact that she rarely talks about it. and of course, there's the fact that richard is the narrator, and she rarely opens up to him in particular. most of richard's thoughts about camilla focus on her physical appearance or else focus on how enigmatic she is. they rarely speak to each other in an honest or emotionally vulnerable way. most likely she felt uncomfortable with the idea because of his crush on her and the possibility that he would react with jealousy. and she was right. when she finally tired to open up to him about what was going on with charles and henry, he ended up getting angry and asking her to leave. did she open up to the others more? henry, if anyone, would be the most likely candidate, but of course richard wasn't witness to that.
and then there's the fact that julian handpicked all the members of his greek cult class based on long conversations with each of them, a conversation during which richard can hardly remember what he said but he remembers feeling like he was being unusually honest and that julian was very impressive and made him feel great. julian was clearly deliberately selecting them for particular traits. was a history of abuse one of those traits?
