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 and Paul climb a rickety ladder to get to the roof; it is freezing cold, and Theo fears that Paul might try to hurt him. When they get to the roof of the Rose home, Paul explains that this was one of his and Alicia’s favorite spots when they were children (Paul 7, Alicia 10). Paul points out the jasmine plant: though it is not currently flowering, it was in full bloom the day Alicia’s mother Eva died.
By literally retracing Alicia’s steps, Theo is trying to access her embodied experience. As he takes in the sensory details of her childhood (the scent of jasmine, the trembling, rickety steps), Theo is taking his desire to empathize to his patient to new, even more worrisome lengths.
Themes
Paul tells Theo the story of when Vernon, Alicia’s father, “killed Alicia.” Theo is flabbergasted by this turn of phrase, so Paul elaborates: after Eva died in the wreck, Vernon was distraught. “Why did it have to be her?” he wondered. “Why didn’t Alicia die instead?” Alicia, so completely hurt by those words, told Paul that “he killed me […] Dad just—killed me.” Theo feels like he finally has found the missing piece of the puzzle of Alicia’s psyche.
Alicia’s reflection that her father (metaphorically) “killed” her is the missing piece of the puzzle. It is worth paying attention to the neatness of this psychological narrative: as in a Greek tragedy, where characters’ lives are specifically structured to reflect ancient ideas of destiny and fate, Theo feels that Alicia’s present has an almost one-to-one correspondence with her past.
Themes
Now, Theo understands the link to Alcestis: “just as Admetus had physically condemned Alcestis to die, so had Vernon Rose psychically condemned his daughter to death.” Theo feels that he can draw a clear line from the rage and trauma Alicia must have felt as a child to her violent murder of Gabriel. “Without possibly even knowing why,” Alicia had displaced her feelings about Vernon Rose to her beloved husband.
Admetus sent his wife Alcestis to her actual death, and Alicia’s father made her feel that her life was worthless to him. In both cases, Alicia and Alcestis were harmed by the very person most responsible for loving and protecting them. No wonder, then, that Alicia struggled to embrace Gabriel as a loving, trustworthy figure—if her father had betrayed her so cruelly, how could anyone ever be safe?
Themes
