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“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
In the Prologue to Act 4, Oliver attempts to explain to Colborne how the group managed to live with the fact that they stood by while Richard drowned. In the full passage, he stresses how complicated it can be to understand humanity, noting that people are full of flaws and passions; they are easily confused or deceived, as they misremember or misperceive the world around them. They can do stupid things, like get drunk and fall in a lake, or do noble things, like confess to a murder they didn’t actually commit. But, in the end, as long as one finds a way to frame things that is sufficiently poetic, that hews to patterns and paradigms which create balance and beauty, almost anything can be justified or explained away. This is both a strength, and a limitation, of the human experience.
“What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends?”
In Act 1, Scene 6, Frederick poses this question during the group’s first week of their final year at Dellecher as they discuss why Julius Caesar is a tragedy rather than a history play. The issue he wants for the students to consider is how friendship complicates the decision that a tyrant must be eliminated. It is not only that Caesar’s behavior is politically dangerous or unacceptable but rather that even his friends come to believe that his behavior is intolerable, leading them to invariably assassinate him, which renders the play a tragedy. Given that the group will ironically contemplate similar circumstances, this conversation raises questions about the limits of friendship and the appropriate justifications for acceding to the death of a friend. That the students might misunderstand the lesson, viewing bullying as equivalent to tyranny, is also part of their tragedy foreshadowed in this conversation.
“I squirmed, unable to dismiss the idea that some huge invisible weight was crushing down on me like a boulder. (It was that ponderous crouching demon Guilt. At the time I didn’t know him, but in the months to come he would climb onto my chest every night and sit snarling there, an ugly Fuselian nightmare.)”
In Act 3, Scene 3, the group of friends must begin to reckon with the ramifications of what they have (not) done. The adrenalin of the moment is gone and they are left with their consciousness of guilt. In this scene, Oliver explains that he felt his complicity in Richard’s death as a kind of oppression, as if it were an external force crushing him mercilessly. He will become intimately acquainted with this feeling and its source, as Guilt, characterized here as a demon, visits him nightly. The reference to Henry Fuseli, an eighteenth-century painter from Switzerland known for his horrible depictions of terror, gives the demon a face. In Fuseli’s paintings, monsters lurk on the beds of innocent women or rip the heads off their victims. The reference to any artist other than Shakespeare is rare in this novel, making it especially powerful as an expression of Oliver’s horror at his part in Richard’s death.
