I don’t get why people act like Henry is such a mystery.
In my head (and I kind of hate saying this), Henry is just another person searching for stability through control. It’s a cliché, but it is true. Reality can be painful—too painful sometimes—and we all find different ways to cope. If Henry survived a car accident as a child and was homeschooled afterward, then it makes sense that he’d feel alienated—from his body, from the world.
Let’s be honest if it wasn’t for Julian who isolated them I doubt Henry would have any other friends.
I can see someone like that retreating into books, into ideas, into the safety of abstraction. There’s comfort in the order of intellectualism, in the illusion that the mind can “fight” the chaos of feeling. I get it. If I’m honest, I’ve always liked the idea of academia for that reason—it elevates the mind, rejects the body, makes thinking sacred. Intellectualizing is a way to handle emotion without having to feel it. And perfectionism? That’s just another form of control.
Henry’s obsession with symmetry and ancient ideals of beauty fits into that. He believes in order, in something larger and more coherent than the mess of real life. Or maybe he wants to believe that it matters. He’s superstitious, too—another attempt to impose meaning on a confusing world.
And yet… there’s the darkness. He kills Bunny. He poisons a neighbor’s dog. It’s not just the coldness that’s disturbing—it’s the act itself. He’s not just detached; he feels entitled to that darkness. There’s a quote in the book—something like, “the more cultivated a person is, the more repressed?” Henry embodies that.
He finds logic in the grotesque. He builds a scaffold of historical precedent around his worst instincts.
You don’t need to invent a motive for violence — you just need to give him a theory. He can’t process pain, so he externalizes it. Classical tragedy becomes a script for moral inevitability. Greek ritual becomes a spiritual excuse.
The bacchanal is supposed to be his way of “letting go,” but I don’t think he actually does. I think he performs letting go. He performed surrender. And performing is always easier than actually processing emotion. That makes sense if he learned to cope that way after the accident—a child in a vulnerable situation, later isolated, with a cold, judgmental father and a mother he clearly doesn’t respect. He didn’t process fear. He avoided it. He built a whole identity around not feeling it.
And don’t get me started on Camilla. To be honest I always found their relationship fascinating and was certain that it was the “real thing”. But come on.
Camilla was safe for him in the worst possible way — remote, symbolic, unattainable. Loving her was like praying to a ruin.
He intellectualizes sexuality so hard it fossilizes. He’d rather cite Plato on ideal forms of beauty than admit someone’s hot.
And yes, there’s repression. But underneath it: grief, rage, humiliation. His relationship to his own desire is built on the idea that indulgence is failure.
He doesn’t want to be witnessed in wanting. That would mean being real. God forbid.
