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Summary
Act 5, Scenes 3–7 and Epilogue
Act 5, Scene 3
Oliver sleeps in Filippa’s room. In the morning, he cleans up after the party. He goes into Richard’s room and is upset by his classmate’s old belongings. To escape his guilt, he returns to the room he shares with James. As he cleans, he notices something amiss with James’s bed and discovers a hole in the mattress. He reaches inside and yanks out a boat hook with dried blood in its crevices.
Act 5, Scene 4
Oliver runs wildly to the FAB with the hook. He creeps into its basement and stashes the hook with the bloody fabric. He then dashes to the theatre, where King Lear is about to begin. He dons his costume and heads to the stage, where Alexander updates him about everyone’s whereabouts. Onstage with James, Oliver performs the lines that the friends had said the previous night. During the performance, Oliver understands that James knows he has discovered the truth.
Act 5, Scene 5
Oliver plans to confront James at intermission. He kisses Meredith when he sees her, saying she helps him understand Shakespeare’s sonnets and asking her to never kiss James again. This ruins the mood, and they part on a sour note. When James comes offstage, Oliver challenges him to say that he didn’t kill Richard. James replies it was an accident. At Oliver’s insistence, James tells the story of the night: Richard’s explosive rage, his attack on Wren, her request that James follow Richard to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. After a short search, James found Richard, who sneered that James and Oliver should admit their feelings for one another. Then Richard shoved James into the boathouse and laughed, daring him to fight. James grabbed a boat hook and swung, hitting Richard in the face. Richard reeled and fell in the water. James fled and met Filippa, who took his bloody clothes to burn. Oliver asks why James concealed this from him. James confesses that Oliver’s likely horror kept him silent. Oliver says everything will be fine.
Act 5, Scene 6
Although the group finishes the play, Oliver cannot say his final lines. They take their final bows and Colborne emerges from the wings, looking at James and asking if he would like to tell the truth. Oliver replies that he is.
Act 5, Scene 7
Oliver is handcuffed in a police car. The reactions of the group vary, from despair (James) or anger (Meredith) to confusion (Filippa), emptiness (Wren), and sadness (Alexander). Oliver also sees an unsatisfied Richard. At the police station, he recites James’s story. Colborne is skeptical about his guilt, as an anonymous source had indicated James was the guilty person. Alexander and Filippa visit Oliver to ask why he confessed. Filippa says her father is imprisoned and she is terrified for Oliver. He explains this was his chance to change the end of a tragedy. She replies he’s a fool. James also visits, begging Oliver to recant, but he refuses. Oliver is convicted of second-degree murder after a short trial.
Epilogue
Colborne admits that the story might not provide him with closure. He asks Oliver about his plans, and Oliver says he needs to see James (who stopped visiting him in prison four years ago). Filippa shamefully admits she concealed James’s suicide. He drowned himself four years earlier. Oliver suddenly feels the presence of Richard. Colborne leaves and Oliver asks Filippa why she never told anyone the truth. She answers that she would have done anything to protect the group, and she was afraid he’d sacrifice himself for James. Oliver has her drop him at the bus station.
Oliver arrives at Meredith’s house. They talk for hours. She explains her kiss with James and how she learned he caused Richard’s death. Oliver admits he was in love with James. Oliver stays with her, and they fall into a comfortable rhythm, soon disrupted when Filippa sends a note which James left for Oliver. It is an ambiguous passage from Pericles. Coupled with the fact that James’s body was never found, the passage hints he may be alive. The novel ends with Oliver scouring the internet for news about James.
Analysis
Oliver’s discovery of the boat hook in James’s bed is accompanied by reference and images associated with Gothic fiction, introducing another literary genre into a novel already keenly aware of its literariness. The Gothic is an appropriate addition because its thematic concerns dovetail nicely with the psychological torment the characters suffer. In Gothic works, readers will often encounter mystery and horror, organized established locations—castles, halls, and other kinds of institutionally specific buildings—which are claustrophobic and suffocating. Passions are extreme and the innocent are pursued by villains, sometimes this pursuit is sexual and sometimes it is psychological. Gothic works often incorporate significant confusions about personal identity and the ability to differentiate fact from fiction. Living in a Castle and engaged in work that requires they fuse their identities with fictional characters, speaking words that aren’t their own, and pursued—in Oliver’s “Fuselian” case, very graphically—by personal demons, it is not hard to see that the world of the students was Gothic long before Oliver discovered the hidden boat hook in James’s mattress. Even the tear in the mattress is sexualized with a reference to lipstick in a final touch of Gothic excess.
Oliver confesses to a murder he did not commit and, in so doing, literalizes James’s prediction early in the novel that he will play the tragic hero before the end of the year. Filippa, the novel’s most clear-sighted character, says he is a fool instead, another stock role in Elizabethan drama. The novel leaves it up to the reader to decide how to understand Oliver’s actions, as well as those of his peers. As in the case of Richard, the members of the group do not act to save Oliver. They have the information that could save him, not something that was likely true of Richard, yet they still do not do so. Oliver has requested that they not, but it’s interesting to think about what the costs of this second silence might be for them. For Oliver, the cost is clear: a felony conviction for murder and ten years in prison.
As he decides what he will do, Oliver cites the speech from Hamlet 5.2 that recurs as a motif across the play, now focusing on the line, “The readiness is all.” In this passage, Hamlet reflects on the evanescence of human existence and the inevitability of death, which will come either early or late, concluding that, if a person is ready, there is nothing to be lost in leaving early. One way to understand Oliver’s use of this line, as well as his insistence that he has earned his punishment, is to see him as already imprisoned by his guilt. That he overstates his importance in the event is clear. Oliver is no more responsible than the others for what they decided on the dock. But Oliver is explicit that he is haunted by Richard and by Guilt, which he characterizes as an allegorical demon best understood by the terrifying portraits Henry Fuseli painted, many of which depicted scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Either way, it is telling that Oliver struggles to say his final lines in King Lear. Edgar has the last lines in the play, and he observes, “The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3). When Oliver confesses, the theory of acting that organizes the novel is approached from one final angle. Knowing the truth, Oliver ought to say that James hit Richard with the boat hook, but he feels guilty and responsible. Taken together, Oliver’s feelings and Edgar’s line serve as a confession. As he explains to Filippa and Alexander, he wants to rewrite how a tragedy can end, allowing the “sidekick” to take the blame. This is the implication of his reference to an alternate ending in Romeo and Juliet. In accepting sole responsibility for Richard’s death, however, Oliver is no longer a sidekick. Whether he is truly a hero or a fool, is left to interpretation.
An uncertain future plagues Oliver to the very end, as he interprets the Pericles passage that James sends him as evidence that his friend may still be alive. Searching the internet for news of James from Meredith’s apartment is another betrayal of her trust in him, suggesting that he may yet again choose James instead of her. That neither of them stood up for Oliver at his trial is a complicating factor. He tells Colborne that he is not sure what he and James meant to one another, but to Meredith he confesses he loved James. Both statements can be true at the same time. It is a peculiar form of love they share, one often expressed through pain and envy. If Oliver’s coming-of-age story shows him graduating from confinement into freedom, the renewal of his obsession with James shows that he is still struggling to escape another kind of prison.
