Richard Papen

RICHARD PAPEN

Richard is the narrator and protagonist in the story. At the time he tells the story, he is a 28-year-old graduate student in California, but most of the action takes place when Richard is a college student in New England.

He was born in Plano, California into a working-class family. It is mentioned that Richard's father was verbally and physically abusive to him and his mother. He attends two years of community college (one in medical school, one in English) in Plano and then, at age 19, transfers to Hampden College in Vermont. Richard begins studying Ancient Greek with a mysterious professor named Julian Morrow, who limits his class size to a small and elite group of students. As a result, Richard becomes close to other students in the class: Bunny Corcoran, Henry Winter, Francis Abernathy, and Charles and Camilla Macaulay, who are twins.

Richard describes the appearances of all his friends, but not himself. We don't know much, just that he was tall as a kid and "prone to freckles." He has "dusty brown hair," which he cuts himself. "I never did a very good job; the finished product was always very thistly and childish, a la Arthur Rimbaud."

Richard is intelligent, sensitive, and ambitious; he wants to build a different life for himself, and at first heedlessly pursues his dreams and ambitions. Over the course of the novel, Richard realizes this desire for beauty, elegance, and intellectual stimulation have made him lose touch with moral principles. At the end of the novel, Richard is resigned to spending most of his life dwelling on the past.

As an observant outsider, Richard constantly analyzes his behavior and motives regarding what he did before he knew exactly what the other characters were up to.

Richard represents the American dream. Although he doesn't stereotypically "go west", he is given many opportunities at Hampden. During this transition, he will also have to be independent. He has no parents who could help him. This is seen when the Greek group leaves for winter break and Richard refuses to give them up. He would rather suffer than rely on another to prove that he is good enough to live alone.

Richard also represents the loss of innocence. He was naive when he decided to continue studying with Julian. When he eventually learns the group's secrets, he realizes that some of his first impressions were completely wrong.

Richard has always been alone and in the end he remains alone. From the very beginning of the novel, his parents did not care about him. While hanging out with the Greek group, he thought he was happy because he had friends. But inside he knew that he didn't know them well enough and that he was still alone.

Realism of the hero & conformity of the hero to the spirit of the time:

Richard and the people outside of his intellectual friend group are very realistic, such as his dorm roommate, all of whom are ordinary young men. The book contains many episodes of parties with alcohol and drugs, which was and remains typical for young people. In the book, Richard experiences another stage of growing up, learning new things: love, idols, disappointment. But the students in the Greek class collected a lot of things that they could not even imagine. This is incest, passion for esoteric knowledge, lack of morality. It is also Henry's disbelief, despite all his intelligence, in the human mission to the moon and his belief in conspiracies. Like their transformation into something inhuman, they themselves seem unreal.

Author's attitude towards the hero:

Since the narrative is told in the first person, the main source of information and intermediary between us and the author is the main character. Through it, the author can convey his ideas and thoughts. But we can also speculate that Richard may be an unreliable narrator. In any case, we receive a subjective assessment of reality through his point of view, and we can consider his opinion as the opinion of the author.
Thus, we see the critique of capitalism and elitism and the deceitfulness of intellectualism through the eyes of a man from a working class family. At the same time, the hero realizes the failure of those whom he idolized only towards the end of the novel, when he finds out about everything, becomes an accomplice against his own will, and sees how other people’s attempts to cope collapse. Then his idealized vision crumbles.
But aside from criticizing intellectuals, Bunny still comes across as one of the worst characters in this book - stupid, conservative, cruel, stubborn, narcissistic. So the book leaves the reader wondering who is worse than the atrocious Bunny or his killers?