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
Theo follows Kathy once again, and once again, she meets her lover. But this time, rather than walking away, Theo decides to follow the man home. As he fantasizes about killing the man, Theo trails him from one bus to another. At last, the man disembarks and turns off onto a quiet, tree-lined street. Theo, still in pursuit, grabs a nearby rock and plans to bring it down on Kathy’s lover’s head.
Theo’s marriage has now more directly begun to parallel Alicia’s; like his patient, he starts to fantasize about murder. And similarly, even as Alicia recovers from being stalked, Theo now turns into a stalker himself—as if their therapy sessions were a how-to book rather than a cautionary tale.
Themes
Before he can do so, however, a group of party-goers spills onto the street, cutting Theo off from the man. Ahead of him on the street, Theo notices the man go into a lit kitchen. There, he shares dinner and a bottle of wine with a woman who has cooked for him. Theo is filled with rage, but he resolves not to kill the man. Instead, he will “do something cleverer than that.”
As in ancient tragic plays, Theo’s literally life-or-death decision to harm Kathy’s lover is interrupted by a twist of fate (in this case, a party ending). Painfully, Theo also sees that there are two betrayals in this man’s affair with Kathy, as (like Theo) the man has a spouse that he is lying to.
Themes
