Trent Harris
“It was like a painting too vivid to be real- every pebble, every blade of grass sharply defined, the sky so blue it hurt me to look at it. Camilla was limp in Henry’s arms, her head thrown back like a dead girl’s, and the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless.”
At the end of Chapter 2, Donna Tartt makes use of powerful descriptive imagery and symbolism to depict this vivid scene of Henry carrying a bleeding Camilla out of the water, which alludes to the seemingly recurring theme of terrifying beauty which can be seen in Tartt’s descriptions of settings and atmospheres throughout the novel thus far. This scene can also serve as a gateway to the discussion that there is perhaps something more terrifying beneath the beauty of these tastefully dressed and elitist characters Richard associates himself with.
Tartt begins the paragraph with the very striking simile, “It was like a painting too vivid to be real,” which evokes powerful imagery in the readers’ mind immediately (Tartt 60). Paintings are associated with a characteristic of displaying this incomparable beauty that is exclusive through art. Describing the scene as a painting too vivid for reality, gives this quality to the scene that helps the reader put a hyper realistic, surreal image in their mind. Additionally, Tartt proceeds to quickly list all the small details that form this vivid painting with no punctuation to slow the pace of the writing, which helps to put every detail into place in the readers’ mind and allow the painted visual to come to life. The word “hurt,”, stood out because it helped portray this vivid afternoon sky which is radiating light that outlines Henry and Camilla (Tartt 60). The idea of the sky being so bright it hurts is a very niche but precise description of a midsummer sky that the majority of readers will be able to comprehend and relate to. Thus, the author uses “hurt” to take the reader back to a summer day and describes the scene with a realistic, personal, and tangible quality.
Furthermore, I thought the usage of “the curve of her throat beautiful and lifeless” was a powerful phrase to end the scene (Tartt 60). I felt the word lifeless was a smart and evocative word choice because the image the author is painting is this instantaneous moment in time where the colors are vivid, yet all are still and “lifeless,” which gives this unusually tranquil quality to the image presented. Another thing I noticed is the contrast and irony of using the words “beautiful and lifeless” as a pair. Typically, dead, or lifeless things have lost their beauty and are terrifying; however, in this scenario the authors use lifeless to complement and even emphasize the beauty of Camilla in the scene.
This contrast of beauty and terror in the scene reminds the reader of Julian lecturing earlier in the book about how “bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful” and “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it” (Tartt 26). This lecture has a lot of foreshadowing in the book and will be a recurring theme and idea. Already within the first few chapters, the reader can pick up on symbolism revolving around this idea of terrifying beauty, and it is seen in the settings Tartt describes in great detail: from the eerily creepy, desolate, yet still beautiful, halls of the campus to the ever so terrifying and depressing snowy landscape where Richard situates himself over the winter in Chapter 3. We also see this concept directly expressed in the paragraph excerpt from the end of Chapter 2. On a deeper level, this idea can even be reflected in the characters of the book, who seem to be portrayed as objectively beautiful, well put together, elegantly dressed, and all carrying themselves with this sophisticated manner. However, we are slowly learning that there is more to them, and they are very secretive, and what we do not know terrifies us the most. Therefore, it is quite possible that these characters are hiding something terrifying beneath the surface of their beauty and looks. The excerpt at the end of Chapter 2 uses symbolism that hints towards this theme that Julian introduces the reader to.
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