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
Before work, Theo asks Kathy what time she is planning to meet her friend, and she tells him that they are rendezvousing at 7:00 p.m. That night, at a quarter to 7:00, Theo makes his way to Kathy’s rehearsal space, hiding himself so as to spy. When Kathy doesn’t exit through the front door, Theo enters the rehearsal hall, and he hears her on the phone with someone.
Instead of taking Ruth’s advice, distancing himself from Kathy and starting anew, Theo embarks down a dangerous, obsessive path. Though there have been hints that he is not quite as healed as he claims to be, readers can now clearly see just how potentially frightening their narrator is.
Themes
Kathy hangs up and leaves the rehearsal hall, heading to Charing Cross Road and then to the corner of Lexington Street. Theo orders a beer at a pub across the way, giving himself a nice vantage point to watch Kathy. He imagines that a passerby is Kathy’s lover, but the two do not interact. Finally, Kathy’s friend shows up—Theo recognizes her, and he realizes that Kathy has been telling the truth about her plans. “I ought to have been grateful,” he thinks. “But I wasn’t. I was disappointed.”
Theo’s “disappoint[ment]” at not catching Kathy in the act is important for several reasons. On the one hand, Theo wants to visibly see Kathy’s betrayal because he—like the titular character of Shakespeare’s Othello—wants to affirm his own suspicions (instead of wondering if he is crazy). But perhaps less obviously, by following Kathy in this way, he is creating a link between his sense of betrayal and the betrayal Alicia recognizes in Alcestis—and thus bringing himself closer to his favorite patient.
Themes
