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Summary
Act 3, Prologue and Scenes 1–4
Prologue
Oliver and Colborne walk around the lake and the former detective asks Oliver why he does not tell his story without any performance or poetics. Oliver explains that the acting students believed everything they did was a performance, making it impossible to divorce performance from the story. Oliver reflects on his relationship with Meredith and the fact that she refused to testify at his trial.
Act 3, Scene 1
The scene picks up where Act 2 Scene 10 ended, with Richard’s gesture. James rushes toward the water, but Oliver tackles him, thinking about Hamlet as he stares at Richard’s mangled face. Alexander yells that they should all wait as James and Oliver struggle. The group enters a fraught moral debate about Richard’s recent behavior and their obligations. A line from Hamlet appears in the text, attributed to no one of the group but presented as their decision: “If it be not to come, it will be now.” Oliver silently reflects on the relief he had felt when he thought Richard was dead. James is the last to agree that what they will do is nothing.
The decision made, the group agrees on their story: Richard was drunk and, prior to his accident, there had been no problems between any of them. They need to call the police but first must determine that Richard has now died. Oliver agrees to check on him and, despite his own terror, does so as the others huddle, like children, on the deck.
Act 3, Scene 2
The students give their statements to the police. Oliver is the last to go. He meets with Detective Colborne, Dean Holinshed, Gwendolyn, and Frederick. He recites the agreed-upon story, including that he got in the lake to check on Richard. Oliver notes that Shakespeare couldn’t have written a better revenge tragedy.
Act 3, Scene 3
The group is given rooms in Hallsworth House as Dean Holinshed informs the rest of the school about Richard. Oliver notes that Richard’s death is already making them anxious and, when James snipes at Alexander, it seems their decision could undermine the group. Filippa cites Macbeth to punctuate her point that they should not bicker. Alexander looks for alcohol and, exhausted, the group decides to go to bed. Unable to sleep, Meredith returns to find Oliver and asks him to join her because she does not want to sleep alone. Desperately sad, they finally sleep.
Act 3, Scene 4
Everything at Dellecher is canceled. Richard’s death is ruled an accident, and Oliver returns to the Castle to pack for the Thanksgiving break. He usually stays but, this year, the school will be closed so he is returning to Ohio. Fillipa is at the Castle and, because he is not sure she has a place to go, Oliver awkwardly invites her to join him. She admits she’s scared, and they both prepare for Richard’s memorial service.
Analysis
Although the students do not perform it, Hamlet is an important reference across the novel. As Oliver stares at Richard, an undead presence in the lake, he recalls a powerful line from 5.2, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” In this line, Shakespeare is developing the idea, articulated in the Gospel of Matthew 10:29, that there is a divine plan not only for the entirety of human and earthly experience but equally a specific (or “special”) fate for each being, even those as seemingly insignificant as the sparrow. Oliver thinks about this line often, even wondering at one later point who the sparrow might be. Here, though, his train of thought moves from Richard’s broken body, likened to a bird pushed too early from the nest, to Hamlet. As the Dean will say later at Richard’s memorial service, his life has ended prematurely, before having the chance to develop his talent or to live fully. Richard will never, in other words, be a man. Citing this 5.2 again later in the scene, Oliver convinces James to withdraw his objection to the group’s collective decision.
The scenes pivot around a moral distinction concerning the death, as the characters debate the difference between killing someone and allowing a person to die. Although their first impulse is to help their colleague, Alexander asks the uncomfortable question of whether or not saving Richard is a moral obligation. As he explains it, Richard’s cruelty and physical violence means they are not required to aid him, particularly as it is evident that he is very likely to die. (None of them explicitly raise the question of his future quality of life, should they try to save him, although it floats beneath the surface of their conversation.) When James objects to Alexander’s postulate, Alexander switches to drama, charging James with an over-identification with the role of the hero. As the novel’s conclusion makes clear, Alexander misjudges James’s position but that does not mean that the group is correct in believing that bullying authorizes inaction.
The language of acting appears regularly across the crucial opening scene of Act 3 and it helps to establish the implications of not acting. Not only do the characters understand what is happening with reference to specific plays and argue with lines from plays, they also view the events through the language of the theatre. Richard thus seems to be “playing dead.” But the language of acting fits uneasily with the choice to not act. James makes this paradox clear when he finally agrees that they should do it, when what they are going to do is, as Alexander says, nothing. The implication in the conversation is that their guilt is attenuated by doing nothing. They are not responsible for Richard’s death as what they chose to do was not to try to save his life. Further, because they made this decision as a group, no one person is to blame, although they quickly realize they must act to protect themselves by making choices about what to tell the police. The time the six spend on the dock is the moral center of the novel and, although Richard is the antagonist, the choice they make creates new opponents they will need to combat: the police and the feeling of guilt.
