Narrative Multiple Personality in “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (post 6): The beginning of this novel looks like it was written by a different person.

When I began reading this novel, I remember being struck by a certain awkwardness in the writing. But I found the rest of the novel to be very well written. And why would this be? Wouldn’t a writer put her best foot forward at the beginning? What could account for such inconsistency?

Perhaps you don’t agree that the writing at the beginning is a little awkward. And it would be tedious for me to analyze sentence structure to prove my point. So let me move on from style to content: the inconsistency in what is said at the beginning of the novel, but ignored subsequently.

As I noted in my first post on this novel (re Prologue and Chapter One): 1. Richard, the first-person narrator, repeatedly describes himself as a liar, and 2. the professor promotes his evil idea that “Beauty is terror.”

Remarkably, both Richard’s basic character flaw and the professor’s evil incitement to violence are completely ignored in the rest of the novel. It is as though the person who wrote the rest of the novel had neither written nor even read the beginning.

Such blatant narrative inconsistency is so incredible to me that I would doubt my own eyes, if I had not seen the same thing, and discussed it previously in this blog, in the works of other writers; e.g., Henry James, Graham Greene, and Joyce Carol Oates.

In short, works of fiction may be written by more than one of the author’s personalities, who may differ from each other in both style and perspective, and who may not even have read what each other has written.