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
In their next therapy session, Theo tells Alicia that he visited her gallery—and that Jean-Felix showed him some of her paintings. At first, Alicia seems interested by this fact, but she is unresponsive when Theo praises the artwork. She perks up when Theo wonders about why she did not include herself in the painting of her mother Eva’s car crash. “In fact,” Theo reminds Alicia, “there was also a little girl in that car. A girl whose feelings of loss I suspect were neither validated nor fully experienced.”
Though Theo’s detective work is certainly an overstep, he now begins to reap the benefits, reflecting Alicia’s troubled childhood back to her in a way that clearly connects. And again, the idea that the car crash might have symbolically killed Alicia links her to the character of Alcestis—and helps explain the way that childhood death and “loss” continue to express themselves as she grows up.
Themes
Feeling that Alicia is challenging him to continue, Theo pulls out his copy of Euripides’s Alcestis. He tries, unsuccessfully, to have Alicia articulate the connection between herself and the mythical heroine. Just before the session ends, Theo offers Alicia the opportunity to paint. Her eyes light up, becoming “the eyes of a child, wide and innocent.” For the first time, she smiles.
In Alicia’s happiest moments with Gabriel, she pictured herself as a child, reflecting that the “past and present were coexisting simultaneously.” So while childhood pain can cause adult damage, conversely, adult happiness—like the kind brought about, for Alicia, by painting—can release the joyful, “innocent” feelings of childhood.
Themes
