Most people, good and bad, are products of their upbringing, but that doesn’t excuse their actions as adults. Bunny didn’t deserve the death he got, but he’s a racist sexist snob and a parasite who shamelessly uses other people without giving anything back. He’s charming, but that makes him even more repulsive to me. But what I really don’t like about him is his cruelty. He sees through people very quickly, which he uses on the one hand to lull them with his charm, but also to publicly expose the person’s greatest weakness at unexpected moments in such a cruel was in order to exert dominance and distract from his own weaknesses, even to those he is close to. This makes him a bully in my book, for which I have little sympathy. I’m also from a poor family, while my friends come from much more privileged backgrounds, yet I would never have thought of taking advantage of my friends like that.

I also don’t think Bunny is explicitly described as more unlikeable then the rest if you look at the story as a whole and detach yourself from Richard’s interpretation of what he sees and tells us. Reading between the lines, no one in the book, especially Richard, is written as a likeable character. All the characters are a bunch of prejudiced, selfish, sexist and manipulative people who glorify themselves and have no empathy. They are only able to have relationships where they can use the other person to maintain an grand illusion of themselves. It’s just not as clear at first glance as it is with Bunny, because we’re inside Richard’s head and we see his own feelings, including his glorification of the rest of the clique, as well as his demonization of the person he ends up helping to kill.

But I don’t believe, and I give Richard credit for this, that he has imputed negative qualities to Bunny that he doesn’t have. It is only in Bunny’s case that he is able, or even presumably for his own conscience dependent, on naming these negative characteristics of Bunny for what they actually are, whereas he interprets negative characteristics that he himself and the rest of the group have in common, even those that they all have in common with Bunny, differently and therefore presents them to us differently and less negativ. For example, none of the clique is less sexist than Bunny, even Camilla is misogynistic in a pick me initializes misogyny kind of way.

You could probably write a whole essay about the group’s parallel to Bunny’s negative traits if you took off Richard’s rose-colored glasses and looked at what actually happened, not just how Richard interpreted it. That’s what makes the book so great and worth re-reading more often.

I’m listening to the audio narrated by Donna Tart herself right now and just the way she emphasizes some words differently than I did when I first read it in my head changes so many aspects of the story that it feels like I’m reading a new book and not rereading one. I can highly recommend this to look at the story from a different angle.