SchulLV Logo
Lerninhalte in Englisch
Abi-Aufgaben eA
Lektürehilfen
Basiswissen
Inhaltsverzeichnis

Thema B

The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

The novel is set at an American elite college in the 1980s. In the excerpt, the protagonist reflects upon his childhood before studying at Hampden College.
1
My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England
2
or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently
3
discovered, by nature. [...]
4
I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father
5
ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and
6
she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San
7
Jose.
8
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the
9
blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup.
10
Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a
11
new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a
12
colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
13
The dazzle of this fictive childhood – full of swimming pools and orange groves and
14
dissolute, charming show-biz parents – has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I
15
think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble
16
of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket;
17
little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have
18
many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did
19
well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read – Tom Swift, the Tolkien
20
books – but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty
21
living room in the long dull afternoons after school.
22
I honestly can’t remember much else about those years except a certain mood that
23
permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching ‘The Wonderful
24
World of Disney’ on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day – early to bed, school the next
25
morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong – but as I watched the fireworks
26
go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more
27
general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home:
28
circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. My
29
father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn’t pay much attention to me; my
30
clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that
31
much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would
32
doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my
33
existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. [...]
34
After high school I went to a small college in my home town (my parents were opposed,
35
as it had been made very plain that I was expected to help my father run his business, one of
36
the many reasons I was in such an agony to escape) and, during my two years there, I
37
studied ancient Greek. This was due to no love for the language but because I was majoring
38
in pre-med (money, you see, was the only way to improve my fortunes, doctors make a lot
39
of money, quod erat demonstrandum) and my counselor had suggested I take a language to
40
fulfill the humanities requirement; and, since the Greek classes happened to meet in the
41
afternoon, I took Greek so I could sleep late on Mondays. It was an entirely random decision
42
which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful.
43
I did well at Greek, excelled in it, and I even won an award from the Classics department
44
my last year. It was my favorite class because it was the only one held in a regular classroom
45
– no jars of cow hearts, no smell of formaldehyde, no cages full of screaming monkeys.
46
Initially I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and
47
distaste for my subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could stimulate something like a
48
talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not
49
downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor; I was held in contempt by
50
teacher and classmate alike. In what seemed even to me a doomed and Pyrrhic gesture, I
51
switched to English literature without telling my parents. I felt that I was cutting my own throat
52
by this, that I would certainly be very sorry, being still convinced that it was better to fail in a
53
lucrative field than to thrive in one that my father (who knew nothing of either finance or
54
academia) had assured me was most unprofitable; one which would inevitably result in my
55
hanging around the house for the rest of my life asking him for money; money which, he
56
assured me forcefully, he had no intention of giving me.
57
So I studied literature and liked it better. But I didn’t like home any better. I don’t think I
58
can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the
59
circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas
60
or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my unhappiness was indigenous to that place.
61
Perhaps a part of it was.
(938 words)
Tartt, D. (1992). The Secret History. London: Penguin Books. pp. 5-8

Assignments

1.
Sum up the information about Richard’s parents.
2.
Analyse the way the protagonist is characterised.
3.
Choose one of the following tasks:
3.1
"[...] I was expected to help my father run his business, one of the many reasons I was in such an agony to escape [...]." (ll. 35–36) Taking the protagonist’s statement as a starting point, assess to what extent expectations shape young people’s aims and ambitions.
or
3.2
The Guardian is running an online project called “How family shapes your identity” asking its readers to contribute their view on the matter.
Write an article for the newspaper’s website, commenting on the role of family background as a factor in shaping one’s identity.

Weiter lernen mit SchulLV-PLUS!

monatlich kündbarSchulLV-PLUS-Vorteile im ÜberblickDu hast bereits einen Account?