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Chapter 36
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
(Here the narrative shifts from Briseis’s perspective to the third person.) In the feast, the Greeks are singing a teasing song in Achilles’s honor and pummeling him in celebration, though Achilles’s whole body hurts. They joke about how badly he needs to bathe, and he fakes a smile but tells them he needs to go urinate. Once outside, he urinates and then decides the other men are drunk enough that he can escape. As the walks along the beach toward his own compound, he thinks hatefully of how Agamemnon pretended to grieve Patroclus when really he was happy that Patroclus’s death made Achilles fight. Achilles just wants to be alone.
In Achilles’s view, Agamemnon is sufficiently callous about the lives of his fellow Greek warriors that he would gladly sacrifice Patroclus to force Achilles back on the battlefield. This view reveals Achilles’s longstanding dislike of Agamemnon and isolation in grief, but it also suggests how lightly ancient Greek culture values the lives of its young men.
Themes
Sniffing himself, Achilles realizes the other Greeks were right that he needs to bathe. He walks fully clothed into the sea until submerged. When he needs desperately to breathe, he surfaces and floats, crying and urinating, until he feels empty with “a kind of hollow peace.” Walking back up the shore to his compound, he tries to tell himself that he’s completed his task, killing Hector—but having killed Hector feels inadequate. He secretly wishes he had cannibalized Hector. He considers returning to party with his beloved soldiers, but since Patroclus isn’t among them, he falls asleep on the beach instead.
Achilles’s mother is a sea goddess; as such, when he walks into the sea and urinates on himself like a young child, he seems to be looking for a mother or a mother-substitute (as Patroclus was) to comfort him in his grief. Unfortunately, there is none to be found; he feels only “hollow peace” at purging his body of tears and urine. Achilles’s secret wish that he had eaten Hector’s corpse shows his desire to take more and more extreme versions of revenge against Hector, since his first revenge—killing Hector—didn’t “work” to bring Patroclus back or exorcise Achilles’s grief.
Themes
Achilles wakes and sees Patroclus kneeling beside him, seemingly alive. Patroclus demands that Achilles cremate him and suggests that his and Achilles’s bones should share the same urn after death. Achilles tries to reach out to him, but his arms won’t move. When he finally can move, he lunges for Patroclus—whose ghost vanishes. Achilles digs a hole in the beach and builds a “miniature burial mound” to Patroclus’s ghost. He feels suddenly uncertain of everything: if Patroclus is alive, does that mean Hector is too?
This scene echoes a scene in The Iliad in which Patroclus’s ghost appears to Achilles and demands cremation. The intentional echo shows that, while Briseis is telling a counter-narrative of the Trojan War, Achilles still exists within the dominant, Greek, heroic narrative. Achilles’s confusion about who is alive and who is dead emphasizes that grief has rendered him disoriented and irrational.
Themes
Achilles resolves to check on Hector’s corpse and then plan Patroclus’s funeral games. In the yard, he finds Hector’s corpse covered by a sheet and wonders who would have done it—the Greeks wouldn’t have, and the slaves wouldn’t have been brave enough. Furthermore, Hector’s corpse was a fractured lump when he last saw it, and now it looks whole. Confused and alarmed, he pulls the sheet away. The corpse beneath is whole, undamaged. Achilles, concluding that the gods have preserved Hector’s corpse, thinks, “FUCK THE GODS.” He refuses to let them defeat him and plans to drag the corpse behind his chariot again rather than leave his revenge undone.
Achilles immediately reaches for a mythological explanation of the sheet covering Hector’s corpse because he can’t imagine that Briseis, an enslaved woman, would be brave enough to tend to the corpse against Achilles’s wishes. The reconstitution of Hector’s corpse does suggest supernatural intervention—yet, on a symbolic level, it also suggests that Achilles’s attempts to exorcise his grief by desecrating Hector’s corpse are doomed to fail.
Themes
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