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, sitting in a beach chair, asks the man next to her for the time. He tells her it’s 3:30, so she says she has to get home. The man tells her she’s at her home on the Cape, but she doesn’t recognize anything when she looks around. She tells him this isn’t her home and the man tells her they’re “going back to Cambridge in a couple of weeks,” but that she likes it at this house, too. Distressed by the unfamiliarity of the place, Alice insists that she wants “to go home now.” The man again explains that this is her home and that she comes here to “relax and unwind.” Alice doesn’t “feel relaxed,” and thinks the man may be drunk.
Alice still does not recognize John for who he is, now only referring to him as “the man” without questioning why she is with him or what her relationship with him is. John’s repeated assurances to Alice that she likes the house they are at (their summer home in Chatham) echo his earlier argument with her about whether or not she preferred coffee or tea in Jerri’s: John tells Alice what she likes, refusing to listen to her when she tries to tell him what she wants and what she doesn’t want. In this way, John denies Alice the ability to have any agency over herself.
Themes
Alice sits in front of a full-length mirror and looks at her reflection, which reveals to her that she has “loose and spotty” skin and her hair is greying. Touching her skin, Alice can’t believe this is her reflection and goes to the bathroom to check that mirror. In this mirror, as well, she notices that so many of her features in the reflection are “grotesquely wrong.” She notices a bucket of paint and goes through the house and paints all the mirrors white.
Earlier in the book, Alice struggled to reconcile the reflection of herself and her body with the damage being done in her brain. Now, however, she struggles to recognize herself in the mirror because the image she has of herself in her brain is so different. By painting over the mirrors, Alice saves herself from the distress of being faced with the fact that the state of her body is beginning the reflect the state of her mind.
Themes
Alice again sits with the man who owns the house while he reads a book. She picks up a different book and studies it before telling him she thinks she’s read it before. The man tells her they had written that book together. She looks at the names of the authors and realizes that the man is John. She opens the book at random and reads the words, which “push past the choking weeds and sludge in her mind to a place that was pristine and still intact.”
The place in her mind that is still “pristine” is reached by the words of her book, which remind her of her marriage to John and what kind of person she was before the symptoms of Alzheimer’s put the brakes on her life. For inexplicable reasons, the familiarity of the words is able to reveal a fleeting clear path to her sense of self and her relationships.
Themes
Alice says “John,” and he puts his book down and looks at her. She says to him, “I remember. I remember you. I remember I used to be very smart.” John tells her she was the smartest person he knew. She looks at the book and remembers that she once was “curious and independent” and knew how to communicate her ideas and knowledge. She misses being part of life because she loved her life and her family. She wants to tell John this but is unable to form the words. Instead, she “boil[s] it down […] into what was most essential” and tells him she misses herself and she “never planned to get like this.” John says he also misses her, “so much,” and knows she didn’t mean for this to happen.
As she reaches this “pristine place,” Alice’s sense of self is restored, but there is still a sense that she is on the outside looking in and knows she only has a finite amount of time to express what she has discovered in herself. Saying she misses herself is the best way Alice can convey to John that she misses having a voice, she misses her marriage and her family, and she misses her identity as a Harvard professor. She is mourning her potential and what her future was supposed to be like. Finally, after months of struggling with a worsening condition, Alice and John are able to truly connect and understand each other.
Themes
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