Previous
Chapter 34
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
Every morning, Achilles goes to Patroclus and kisses him on the mouth before battle. Briseis longs to tell him to cremate the body, which has begun to smell, but she doesn’t. At night Achilles goes into the room with Patroclus’s body and won’t allow anyone else in. Briseis hears Achilles say “not yet” and assumes Achilles is telling the body that he hasn’t yet killed Hector. Occasionally Alcimus peeks in, and he and Briseis see Achilles standing by Patroclus—who is raised on a frame called a “bier”—with his head on his dead friend’s chest. Once Alcimus hears Achilles groan and tries to enter, only for Briseis to stop him. When Alcimus protests that they shouldn’t leave Achilles alone, Briseis replies: “He is alone.”
Briseis claims that Achilles “is alone” whether or not she and Alcimus join him in the room with Patroclus’s corpse. This claim emphasizes that both Achilles’s overwhelming grief and his bizarre behavior—refusing to cremate the corpse, kissing it before battle, talking to it at night—are isolating him from everyone around him.
Themes
After five days, the Greeks break through the Trojan line. The Trojan fighters flee inside the gates of Troy. King Priam and Queen Hecuba both urge Hector to hide too, but he stays outside to fight Achilles. Briseis has been watching the battle from a Greek ship, but at that she goes back to the women’s huts, unwilling to watch. All the women know Troy is about to be conquered, destroying their hopes of being freed, but they go on weaving like something terrible will happen if they stop. Then, from far away, they hear women wailing—and they realize that Hector, “the last and greatest defender of Troy,” has been killed.
Hector, “the last and greatest defender of Troy,” might seem to contrast with Achilles, fighting for his home and his family rather than for individual glory or vengeance. Yet Hector refuses to hide from Achilles inside the walls of Troy to save his own life and fight another day. Instead, he chooses to die bravely, on his own terms, with masculine honor—which shows his fundamental adherence to the same martial code that shapes Achilles’s life.
Themes
