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Part 4, Chapter 20
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 walks all the way back to Kathy’s lover’s house. Again, he sees the man’s wife in the window: “she looked innocent,” he thinks, “as I had once looked.” Over the next few days, he keeps coming back, buying some things across the street and watching the woman through the window.
A few days earlier, Theo identified with Kathy’s lover—but soon after, he begins to see himself in Kathy’s lover’s wife. Fascinatingly, the word “innocent” (which Theo has earlier used to describe Alicia) depicts both Theo and this mysterious woman as children, helpless, youthful victims of their dishonest partners.
Themes
One day, without knowing fully why, Theo slips into the little summerhouse at the back of the property. When the woman notices him, he slips on a black balaclava and gloves. In the mirror, the woman spots Theo—he is holding a knife. “This was the first time I came face-to-face with Alicia Berenson,” Theo reveals. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
In this shocking climax, it becomes clear that Kathy’s lover was Gabriel, and that Theo was the masked man all along—he was the one asking Alicia questions, and he was the one who broke into her house on the day Gabriel died. By capping his wild reveal with a stock phrase (“the rest […] is history”), Theo tries to blame destiny, taking narrative agency away from himself—when in fact he made every decision to continue to stay in Alicia’s life, before and after the murder.
Themes
