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
The next morning, Theo arrives at the Grove and hears a woman screaming. He worries that Alicia has been hurt. But in fact it is Elif, bleeding from her eye. Quickly, Theo realizes that Alicia has stabbed her with a paintbrush. And when he turns to see Alicia, she is completely still, motionless, like in the self-portrait Alcestis. For the first time, Theo begins to feel afraid of her.
There is great symbolic weight in the fact that Alicia commits violence with a paintbrush. In addition to being a vehicle of communication, Alicia’s art is also a way she expresses her rage—punishing Lydia, her mother, and Gabriel with her disdainful portraits. Is the Alcestis, then, a kind of self-harm, in which she attacks herself the same way she goes after Elif or Lydia or her other subjects?
Themes
