Author's Purpose & Message Practice (The Secret History)

The author’s purpose is to describe a reoccurring dream impacting the narrator.

• “If, lying in my bed at night, I find myself unwilling audience to this objectionable little documentary . . .”

• “I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power..”

The main idea the author is trying to convey is that the narrator is haunted by the dream.

• “Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess.”

• “I suppose we’d simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination”

Although it isn’t stated explicitly, the author is implying that the dream recounts an event that has really happened.

• “. . . it mirrors the remembered experience more closely than one might imagine.”

• “. . . so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves . . .”

The author is implying that the action the narrator recalls having taken was something morally reprehensible.

• “It was many hours before I was cognizant of what we’d done; days (months? years?) before I began to comprehend the magnitude of it.”

• “. . . the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own.”

The author is implying that the narrator feels no remorse for this action, but knows he should feel regret.

• “. . . the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own . . . . Never, never once in any immediate sense, did it occur to me that any of this was anything but a game.”

• “I watched it all happen quite calmly—without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity—so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.”