The Silence of the Girls: Chapter 46 Summary & Analysis

(Here the narrative switches from Briseis’s perspective to the third person.) It is very hard for Achilles to convince the other Greek kings to agree to the cessation of battle. He feels that Patroclus would have approved of his persuasiveness. When he finally gets the agreement, Odysseus—who argued against the cessation—says that they might “make a diplomat” of Achilles “one day.” Achilles laughs, knowing he doesn’t have a future. Every morning he goes to the shore to see Thetis, though having spent his whole life living with her grief over his mortality, he’s always glad when their meetings end. When he gets back to his quarters, he polishes his new armor with Alcimus—ignoring Automedon’s disapproving expression at Achilles doing a subordinate’s labor.

As Achilles polishes his armor, he thinks about his childhood with Thetis. She felt repressed rage at the gods for having ordered her to marry a mortal man, and she was obviously disgusted by sex and perhaps also by breastfeeding Achilles. Her disgust affected him. Sex sometimes scratched an itch for him, but he never truly enjoyed it, whether with female or male partners: “Even Patroclus was made to pay a high price for such pleasure as he gave or got.” And yet, while Achilles greatly loves his father Peleus, he feels that he’s a mother’s boy who never fully matured past the age when she left him.

As Achilles feels his own death approaching, his grief for Patroclus becomes easier to bear: it’s as if Patroclus isn’t gone but in front of him just out of sight. He tells Automedon and Alcimus stories about Patroclus from the first years of the war and Briseis stories about his youth with Patroclus: his feeling of immediate recognition when he first saw Patroclus, how lucky it was for him that they met, how perhaps unlucky it was for Patroclus. He knows that Briseis feels Patroclus’s presence very strongly when they’re together, just as he does, feeling that “their relationship—if you can call it a relationship—[is] filtered through their shared love for Patroclus.”

One morning, Achilles walks outside and finds Briseis vomiting. When he asks what’s wrong, she admits she’s pregnant. When he asks whether she’s sure, she looks him dead in the eye and says yes. He believes her because she didn’t even lie about Agamemnon raping her when it would have protected her to. Somehow, knowing about the pregnancy makes him worry about the future and fear death again.

One evening, near the end of the battle-cessation, Achilles picks up his lyre again for the first time since Patroclus’s death and plays a lullaby from start to finish. After that, he plays all the time. Then, late one night, Briseis is lying in bed watching him play when he tells her he’s just remembered something and goes outside yelling for Alcimus. Achilles sits Alcimus down in the hall, pours him a drink, and says that Briseis is pregnant and that, if he dies, he wants Alcimus to marry her and raise the child in Peleus’s house. Alcimus replies that he doesn’t merit the “honour.” Achilles has him swear to do it anyway. When Alcimus asks whether Briseis knows the plan, Achilles says she doesn’t need to yet.

Achilles goes back to his room, where Briseis is waiting, and begins to play the song he was composing when Patroclus died, the one for which he couldn’t devise an ending. Patroclus always said the song sounded fine to him, which was deeply unhelpful. As Achilles plays, he feels Patroclus in the room—as he has every night since he started playing the lyre again—and realizes that the last notes he has already composed, which sound like the raindrops at the end of a massive storm, are the song’s real ending after all. He tells Briseis, “Finished.”