Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silent Patient, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Empathy, Identification, and Boundaries
Tragedy and Destiny
Honesty vs. Deception
Childhood Trauma
Silence vs. “The Talking Cure”
Summary
Analysis
When Theo gets home, Kathy is sitting on the couch, texting. Theo tries to find the words to confront her, but he struggles and goes “mute.” Instead, Kathy confronts him, telling him she has discovered his weed and expressing that she feels like she doesn’t know him at all. Theo is overcome with a desire to hurt Kathy, but instead he suggests they go to bed. Once Kathy is asleep, Theo begins to cry, acknowledging that his wife is now a stranger to him.
The use of the word “mute” is particularly telling here—in a moment of violent rage, Theo, like Alicia, finds that he can only resort to silence. And unfortunately, he cannot follow through on Ruth’s advice if he cannot even find the language to end things with Kathy.
Themes
The next morning, Kathy goes to work, and Theo takes a scalding hot shower. In the shower, he decides to defy Ruth’s advice: rather than leaving Kathy, he will try and forget that he ever learned of the affair. “I wasn’t condemned to repeat the past,” Theo assures himself. “I could change the future.”
One of the defining traits of Greek tragedy is hubris: the protagonist believes that he is able to change his destiny or overcome the impossible, and so he acts against the advice of those who love him best. Here, readers should understand that Theo is acting with hubris—and that in believing, wrongly, that he is capable of “chang[ing] the future,” he catalyzes his own doom.
Themes
