Snow Symbol Analysis

In Alex Michaelides’s novel The Silent Patient, snow symbolizes the great difficulty of finding peace and happiness after childhood trauma. At the beginning of the novel, narrator Theo Faber describes a fleeting moment of joy amidst his father’s abuse—while his father was away and his mother was asleep, Theo snuck outside during a snowstorm, holding his hands out to catch falling snowflakes. “Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness,” Theo reflects, “an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing.”

In interviews, Michaelides has admitted to being inspired by the way William Shakespeare uses weather to communicate interior life and emotion (particularly with the storms in King Lear). So, it is only fitting that snows plays a similar function throughout the novel. When Theo arrives at the Grove to serve as Alicia Berenson’s therapist, his colleagues constantly predict snow, which never comes. But after the depth of Theo’s criminality has been discovered, the snow begins to fall—and the story ends as he catches a snowflake, watches it disappear, and goes “to catch another one.” Given what snow meant to Theo in childhood, the absence of snow throughout his time at the Grove shows how hard it is for him to find the moments of joy he so desperately craves. And by ending with Theo’s repeated attempts to catch snow, this melting, ephemeral substance, the novel hints that Theo’s quest for happiness might be hopeless after all.