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Chapter 30
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silence of the Girls, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mythology and Oppressed Perspectives
The Effects of Misogyny
Honor and Violence
Slavery and Dehumanization
Grief and Revenge
Summary
Analysis
(The narrative switches from Briseis’s perspective to the third person.) Thetis asks Achilles what’s wrong and how he’s hurt—questions she asked him when he was a child and came home crying with scrapes. Though Achilles liked her attention, he disliked her premature grief over his death because he was born mortal. Achilles tells Thetis that Patroclus has died and it’s Achilles’s fault—he should have been fighting. Now his one remaining goal is to kill Hector. Thetis reminds Achilles that he’ll die soon after if he kills Hector. Achilles replies that he’s only living to kill Hector—after that, he’ll want to die. Thetis promises to bring him replacement armor the following morning and then reenters the sea. When Achilles fails to feel his usual pain at her leaving, he supposes that his grief over Patroclus obliterates “every lesser grief.”
Here, the novel implies that Thetis may have abandoned her human family not only because she resented her forced marriage to King Peleus but also because reminders of her son’s mortality—and thus his eventual death—overwhelmed her with grief. In this scene, Achilles blames himself—and not Briseis, for once—for his failure to fight and thus for Patroclus’s death. His immediate response to grief is vengeful: he wants to kill Patroclus’s killer, that’s all. Achilles’s realization that Patroclus’s death has subsumed the “lesser grief” of his mother’s abandonments reveals that while Achilles first clung to Patroclus as a kind of mother-replacement, Patroclus grew to matter more to Achilles than Thetis did.
Themes
Achilles feels functionless and dissociated from his body until he climbs to the Greek camp’s parapet and yells out his war cry three times. The Greek soldiers, fighting to recover Patroclus’s body, see him not merely sunlit but wrapped in the goddess Athena’s aegis with flames springing from his head. The Trojans’ perceptions are not passed down: “The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.” Every time Achilles cries out, the Trojans fall back. The third time, the Greeks finally take possession of Patroclus’s body.
When the Greeks see Achilles on fire and blessed by a goddess, they are clearly in the process of mythologizing him while he is still alive. When the third-person narrator says that the Trojan’s perceptions die with them because “the defeated go down in history and disappear,” it seems only partially correct. On the one hand, Homer’s Iliad, a Greek mythologization of the Trojan War, has gone down in history as the definitive account of what happened. On the other hand, The Silence of the Girls—narrated by an enslaved Trojan woman—is intended as a corrective to The Iliad, and this suggests that “stories” about the defeated do not necessarily die even if their narratives die out in their original forms.
Themes
When Patroclus’s body is returned to the Greek camp, Achilles washes it, pours oil in its wounds, and cradles it. When his friends try to embrace him, he pushes them away. He walks to the sea but resolves not to wash off the “filth” on his body or bury Patroclus until he has killed Hector. He sleeps in bed that night “curled up against” Patroclus’s body. The next morning before sunrise, he goes to the seashore again and paces until Thetis arrives with his new armor. He allows her to embrace him and sob, but he doesn’t care—he only cares about killing Hector.
Achilles’s decision not to wash off the “filth” of preparing Patroclus’s body until he has killed Hector hints that Achilles hopes killing Hector will figuratively wash him clean of guilt and grief. It remains to be seen whether revenge will in fact have that effect. Meanwhile, his fetal sleeping position “curled up against” Patroclus’s corpse and his lack of interest in Thetis’s own misery emphasize that the dead Patroclus has fully replaced his mother as the emotional black hole at the center of his life.
Themes
