Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Still Alice, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ambition and Success
Loss of Identity
Illness, Marriage, and Family
Alzheimer’s, Quality of Life, and Happiness
Summary
Analysis
Alice can hear Lydia and John talking about her. John says she’s been asleep for about 18 hours, something she’s done a couple of times before. Lydia is worried, but they leave Alice alone to get dinner. While she sleeps, Alice has a dream that she is harnessed to a parasail. John asks if she’s ready before letting go of her. She flies into the air at “exhilarating speed,” but has no control over direction. She looks back at her family and wonders “if the beautiful and spirited winds would ever bring her back to them.”
Alice’s dream about John sending her flying off into the sky reflects her own feeling that he’s letting go of her, perhaps precipitated by the announcement of his intention to move to New York with her for a new job. She is losing her sense of place within her family as she flies off with the “spirited winds” in her dream. Although the feeling is “exhilarating,” it also emphasizes how alone she is as she leaves her loved ones and former life behind her.
Themes
When Alice wakes up, Lydia is lying in bed with her and tells her she’s been asleep for a “couple of days.” Alice apologizes and studies Lydia but has a “hard time identifying Lydia as a whole.” Alice tells her she’s “afraid” of now knowing who she is one day. Alice wonders if her love for Lydia is powerful enough to remain “safe from the mayhem in her mind” and decides it is because it exists “in her heart.”
Alice’s fear of forgetting Lydia reflects a deeper question: once she forgets her family, does that mean she ceases to feel the deep love she has for them? Alice believes her love for her children is more integral to her sense of self than any other element of her identity and resides in her heart, which is a safe distance from the ravages of Alzheimer’s in the mind.
Themes
Alice tells Lydia she doesn’t want to move to New York because she wants to be in Cambridge when Anna’s babies are born. Alice says that she feels “safe” in Cambridge and worries she’ll lose John in New York, and Lydia urges her to tell John this. Then Alice tells Lydia she is proud of her and that, in case she forgets, to “know that I love you.”
Lydia rather naïvely believes that if John knows how much Alice wants to stay in Cambridge, the choice for him will be easy. However, this contradicts what Alice knows about him and her earlier realization that either Alice or John will have to make the ultimate sacrifice—realistically, that sacrifice will certainly fall to her.
Themes
Alice tells John she doesn’t want to go to New York and expresses anger over the situation. She asks him if there’s any way for him to still take his sabbatical, but he says he can’t, and this is his “one shot at discovering something that truly matters.” Alice argues that he will have other shots because he’s “brilliant” and doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, but this next year is her final shot at “living [her] life and knowing what it means.” John assures here they would still have time together, but Alice tells him moving takes all she has left away. Alice begs him to take the year off, but he says he can’t spend a year “just sitting and watching” her change. Alice tells him she’s the only one dying.
For the first time, Alice confronts John with the unfairness of how he’s treating her disease and the choices he is making, particularly the one to move to New York. Like with so many of their arguments, John is not able to look at the question from Alice’s perspective, instead showing that he is primarily thinking of himself by saying that he can’t sit and watch Alice decline. Alice’s point that she is the one dying shows that even though she is rapidly losing her awareness of many things, she is still able to recognize John’s selfishness in thinking only of his own struggles and ignoring hers.
Themes
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John takes Alice to the cemetery, but there’s so much snow that they can’t get to her family’s plot. Alice wants to stay but becomes uncomfortable and they leave. John tells her they can try again later. At home, John gets ready to make their dinner and opens the freezer. While he searches for chicken, he suddenly says, “Oh no, Alice” and pulls out her BlackBerry. It’s gotten water in it, so John doubts it will work again. This makes Alice cry even though John tells her they can get her a new one. Alice is not able to identify why she feels “an inconsolable grief over the death of the Blackberry itself.”
Alice’s BlackBerry was one of her final connections to her old life: it had her calendar, schedule, and even the quiz she takes every day to determine how much she is forgetting and which is supposed to determine when it is time for her to follow through on her suicide plan. However, she seems to be misplacing her grief over deaths of her family (the fact that they went to the cemetery means it’s January 19th, the anniversary of Anne and Sarah’s deaths) and projecting it onto the death of her organizer. Additionally, Alice was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s on this same date the year before, so the death of the BlackBerry also echoes the gradual death of Alice’s former life and identity that started as soon as she received her diagnosis.
Themes
