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Chapter 38
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.) Once Briseis leaves, Achilles is furious with himself for being unable to eat, sleep, play the lyre, or have sex. He lies there thinking about Patroclus: his smile, his body, his smell. He had supposed that once he killed Hector and gave Patroclus a lavish burial, he would feel better, but he still feels grief like physical agony. When he finally falls asleep, he dreams a recurring dream: he is walking in a tunnel full of corpses, a place he hopes is Troy but fears is Hades. He tries to determine whether the corpses are Greek or Trojan; when he can’t, he wishes he could burn them regardless of their origin: “nobody should be left to rot like this, unburied and unmourned.”
The intensely physical nature of Achilles’s grief for Patroclus—e.g., his longing for Patroclus’s smile and smell—emphasizes the erotic dimension in the men’s relationship. The novel may be hinting that Achilles was in love with Patroclus as well as loving him like a friend, but that the men were unable to sustain a long-term romantic relationship. Here, Achilles consciously recognizes that he hoped taking revenge on Hector would assuage his grief—but evidently, revenge can’t do that. Meanwhile, Achilles’s dream in which he acknowledges that “nobody should be left to rot” reveals that he knows his desecration of Hector’s corpse is beyond the bounds of honorable behavior.
Themes
Suddenly, one corpse jumps up and greets Achilles as “friend.” Achilles immediately recognizes the corpse as King Priam’s son, prince Lycaon. He tries to tell the corpse he doesn’t know it and, in doing so, wakes up. Haunted by his dream, he wonders why he keeps remembering Lycaon out of all the men he’s killed. He remembers Lycaon crawling out of the river, grabbing onto Achilles’s knees, and pleading for his life, saying he was only Hector’s half-brother and hadn’t been involved in Patroclus’s killing. When Lycaon asked Achilles to think what his “good, kind, brave, gentle friend” Patroclus would do, Achilles had an intense negative reaction to the word “friend” and told Lycaon to accept his death, as Patroclus—much better than Lycaon—was already dead.
Earlier, the narration mentioned that Achilles would remember only Lycaon out of all his kills without explaining why. Achilles’s dream-memory of killing Lycaon suggests that Achilles remembers Lycaon because Lycaon got under his skin. By praising Patroclus as “good, kind, brave, gentle,” Lycaon intensified Achilles’s guilt over his own role in Patroclus’s death. Since Achilles failed as Patroclus’s friend, Lycaon’s use of the word “friend” provoked Achilles, making him believe that every man less virtuous than Patroclus—including perhaps Achilles himself—should die.
Themes
Achilles wonders furiously why he can’t dream of Patroclus if he’s going to dream of dead people. He walks to the mirror and stares at himself. Though he feels Patroclus behind him, he doesn’t turn, knowing “from repeated disappointments” that he won’t see Patroclus’s ghost. He repeats to himself the words he said to Lycaon: “So die, friend . . . Patroclus is dead and he was a far better man than you.”
The phrase “from repeated disappointments” reveals that Achilles has turned around many times, searching for Patroclus’s ghost, only to find empty air. When he repeats in the mirror the phrase he said to Lycaon, it makes clear that he killed Lycaon out of a displaced desire to die himself: since neither Lycaon nor Achilles was as good a man as Patroclus, both of them (in Achilles’s view) should have died before him. Interestingly, Achilles believes that Patroclus was a “better man” than he is even though Achilles better fits the ancient Greek ideal of a glorious warrior—implying that Achilles has some counter-cultural beliefs about goodness that he hasn’t fully thought out.
Themes
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Achilles, knowing he won’t go back to sleep, walks to the stable yard. The grooms won’t meet his eyes. He wonders whether it’s his new morning habit, or their fear that they might fear grief as deep as his, or their fear that they’ll never love anyone enough to feel grief as deep as his. He checks Hector’s corpse, still tied to his chariot; the previous night it was a battered lump, but this morning it is pristine again. Furious, he mounts the chariot and begins to drive.
Achilles speculates that the grooms may avoid his eyes due to his new morning habit, i.e., his daily desecration of Hector’s corpse. This speculation reveals that Achilles knows these desecrations are outside the bounds of honorable warrior behavior—but that, in his overwhelming grief, he simply can’t stop himself from taking revenge on Hector’s corpse again and again.
Themes
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Achilles remembers Patroclus’s pyre. Though he had sworn not to cut his hair before returning home from Troy, he cut his hair at Patroclus’s funeral and put it in Patroclus’s hands to burn. He feels certain he will never return home; he’s going to die soon after Hector, as Thetis predicted. He thinks of Patroclus’s funeral urn and the memories the bones he placed inside evoked, including the thigh bones that evoked “memories of summer nights on this beach, nine years ago, when they first came to Troy.”
Patroclus’s thighs made Achilles think of “summer nights on the beach” at the beginning of the Trojan War. This association strongly implies that Achilles and Patroclus had a sexual relationship early in the war that ended for some reason. It also implies that Achilles’s grief may be based in his romantic love for Patroclus as well as in their strong friendship.
Themes
Achilles urges the horses to a gallop and drives them round and round Patroclus’s burial mound. When he’s done, Hector’s corpse is utterly battered. He goes into his rooms and stares in his metal mirror, knowing what he’ll see: the injuries he inflicted on the corpse on his own face. He knows that he is shaming himself by defiling Hector’s body, but he can’t stop.
When the desecrations that Achilles inflicts on Hector’s body appear on Achilles’s own face, it symbolically suggests both that Achilles defiles his own martial honor in attempting to defile Hector and that Achilles further harms himself emotionally and psychologically in trying to assuage his grief through vengeance.
Themes
