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Part 4, Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Silent Patient, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Empathy, Identification, and Boundaries
Tragedy and Destiny
Honesty vs. Deception
Childhood Trauma
Silence vs. “The Talking Cure”
Summary
Analysis
Theo wonders whether or not it is appropriate to share a cigarette with Alicia. He reflects on Christian’s comment (“borderlines are seductive”), and he notes the sharp intelligence behind Alicia’s eyes. Eventually, Theo decides to smoke with her, and Alicia continues with her story.
Like Alicia, Theo knows that sharing a cigarette will render them equals in a way that is not fully professional. But sharing a cigarette is also an intimate, even a flirtatious gesture; is Alicia trying to actually, sexually “seduce” Theo?
Themes
Alicia begins to describe her encounter with the man: while he drank one of Gabriel’s beers, she was still as a statue, preparing herself to fight back. When she moved towards Gabriel’s gun, the man informed her that he had moved it—and points the gun at Alicia. Alicia explains that though she felt confident the man would kill her, she was also aware that he might toy with her for hours, until Gabriel returned home. Unfortunately, Gabriel called to say that he was going to be even more delayed. Overhearing this, the man had a new, sadistic idea: he grabbed some wire from Alicia’s canvases and tied Alicia up with it.
The man is completely at home in Alicia’s house, to the point that he knows that Alicia has recently moved Gabriel’s gun to a new spot. This sense of ease suggests either that the man is Gabriel in disguise, or that he has spent so much time studying the house that he knows it as if it was his own; just as Theo and Alicia’s boundaries are blurring, the walls of a house no longer seem to have any definition or meaning. Heartbreakingly, by tying Alicia up with materials from her art studio, the man weaponizes her source of comfort—her artwork—against her.
Themes
Alicia tells Theo that she wished the man had killed her then and there. Theo is suddenly overcome with an urge to kiss and hold Alicia. “I feel that you need to be taken care of,” he tells her; “I find myself wanting to take care of you.” Alicia simply replies that that is not what she wants from Theo, and then she walks back inside.
In addition to transgressing the final, most vital barrier between patient and therapist, Theo’s sexual attraction to Alicia is also tinged with something more parental: he wants to “take care” of her as Vernon and Eva never did.
Themes
