My Small Analysis About The Secret History, And The Way It Seems To Fall In The Absurdism:

My small analysis about The Secret History, and the way it seems to fall in the absurdism:

Through the whole book, we have these little details, characters and else that break the classic (and very structured) rules of writing. In literature, it is known that every character and every interaction is forced to have a weight on the narrative, however, in the book we find characters that are there or things that happen just because. The person following Bunny and Henry on their trip, or the character that lied about seeing something the day of Bunny's murder.

Now, this is only in the way the book is structured, however, if we look closely, we find the perfect example of why this falls in the absurdism. You see, Camus was a firm believer that things don't have to happen for a reason, that nothing matters because at the end, we all are going to die, and that it doesn't matter what we do.

Henry (and I would say Camilla and maybe even Francis) follows this idea after the bacchanal. It is the result of the bacchanal.

The murder, which is a mere concept that fall in the category of terror by humans, is an act of destruction, one of the worst transgressions (if not considered the worse one). Death is only allowed if it happens because of some sort of destiny, divinity or deity, death is a transgression for humans, the thin line. When they murdered the farmer, they crossed this line, clearly, the main strenght in this, is Henry.

When he's the main responsable of this death, he crossed the line. And then, he got away with it. So, this bringed in him the idea that, actually, nothing matters. Nothing matters because he alredy killed someone, and nothing changed. He still got up, got to study, got to live as he wants.

He described that he often felt like life was meaningless and bland, but after killing someone, he noticed that life is actually meaningless, yet, this as well means he could do whatever he wished.

That's why he could kill Bunny, that's why he decided he wanted to be closer to Camilla, play around with poisoning. Henry realized that if life was empty on its own, he could do as he pleased, because there's nothing stopping him.