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
That afternoon, Theo travels to Cambridge to visit Alicia’s cousin Paul Rose. He arrives at an ugly Victorian house, sequestered by itself on a riverbank. Theo muses that Alicia’s childhood home is a crucial key to her adult life: all of her future choices and experiences can be explained by what happened here. “No one is born evil,” but very young people cannot take revenge, so when they are mistreated, they hold onto that anger, unleashing it at a later date. That suppressed rage, Theo believes, is why Alicia killed Gabriel.
At the end of the last chapter, Theo has promised that he will stop looking for clues; now, he arrives at Paul’s house to do more searching. So just as any hubristic, tragic hero might, Theo is ignoring Diomedes’s sound advice to continue down his fateful path. It is therefore only fitting that arriving at Alicia’s home makes Theo reflect on destiny: “no one is born evil,” but something has happened to both him and Alicia to make them engage in this kind of destructive (or self-destructive) behavior.
Themes
Theo notices a large willow tree, and he pictures Alicia as a child, playing underneath the branches. All of a sudden, Theo is overcome with a sense of unease, as if he is being watched. He notices an old woman in the window, with a mean, ugly face. And then, before he understands what is happening, he feels himself be hit in the head from behind.
Just two chapters ago, in her diary entry, Alicia recalled playing underneath this very tree—and now Theo, without having read the diary, pictures her there. Even when Theo is not aware, therefore, the two characters are becoming more and more closely aligned in their perceptions and ways of making sense of the world.
Themes
