Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Illness
Storytelling, Memory, and Emotion
Love and Family
Responsibility and the Medical System
Summary
Analysis
Susannah inserts a DVD marked with her name into her player and watches footage of herself from the hospital. The video captures unhinged, raw panic in her face, and she realizes that she can barely imagine what it's like to experience that kind of fear. Susannah tells the reader that without these videos, she wouldn't have been able to imagine that she was even capable of this kind of madness. Susannah wonders if she can somehow help her self in the video.
By acknowledging that there's a disconnect between what the video explains and what she remembers, Cahalan explores the limits of what the videos’ stark facts can truly do. Though they make it clear that she was a different person, and show that that person was terrified, it's another thing altogether to have to reconcile this with her lack of memory, particularly of her emotions at the time.
Themes
