Her silence was like a mirror-reflecting yourself back at you,and often,it was an ugly sight.

"Her silence was like a mirror reflecting yourself back at you, and often, it was an ugly sight."

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So,did you read it?Liked it?Hated it?Let me know okay!

Until then,I'm gonna be sharing my opinions

I would like to begin with my character analysis

CHARACTER ANALYSIS

THEO FABER-Theo’s role as a psychotherapist was quite ironic because he was the one who needed help.HE was the one still fucked up, not having the mental strength to accept the truth of the various stages of grief, he was still stuck at the denial phase. From the very beginning, we come to know about the abuse he had been facing back at home. 

“I’d dive under my bed and slide under it, against the wall. I’d breathe in the feathery air, praying the bricks would swallow me up and I would disappear. But his(Theo’s father) hand would grab hold of me, drag me out to meet my fate. The belt would be pulled off and whistle in the air before it struck. Each successive blow knocked me sideways, burning my flesh. I’d be tossed to the floor landing in a crumpled heap, A rag doll, discarded by an angry toddler.'

Theo himself maybe knew that he wasn’t able to get his father and the trauma out of him entirely,

“ I had internalized my father, introjected him, buried him deep, within my unconscious” 

At some point, he realizes that in trying to keep Kathy close, in trying to play a game of pretending,he had destroyed her, and not just her, but Alicia as well. He was now living like his father, back in Surrey with a depressed wife and stuck in a loveless marriage. 

ALICIA-

 “Unexpressed emotions will never die, They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

This one statement by Sigmund Freud defines all of Alicia. She was unable to deal with the demons of her past and throughout her diary entries,we see her thoughts deflecting to something she is scared of, of happening, or of doing?

-PROFESSOR DIOMEDES

 The one thing about Professor that I found a bit irrelevant is his little talks about music.I didn’t quite figure out why that was necessary and how that helped.(which I don’t think it did)Other than that I found his role as a Professor and the head of the psychiatric unit played out pretty good,at times where he supported Theo in aspects of the”Therapy” with Alicia and did what he felt was right. 

STEPHANIE AND CHRISTIAN

 I felt these two characters were important as side roles,but they could have been better.Stephanie as someone whose presence showed us the strictness that the Trust was putting on The Grove,proving the point that Alicia was an important patient.Christian as Alicia’s doctor in the past.Yet,Christian’s actions ,like giving in so easily to Theo when confronted by him,He could have asked for the proof from Theo,what if Theo was lying?Or didn’t have any evidence to turn Christian in?But we see him being a coward and just starting to plead in front of someone whom he had been hating all this while. That was a bit silly and I think could have been handled better. 

MAX BERENSON 

A character I found pretty complex and hard to read as a reader.His complex feelings towards Alicia,him calling her a bitch in his office while speaking to Theo and then breaking down for Alicia right in front of his wife,made me wonder if i should feel sympathy for his feelings towards Alicia ,or anger for what he did to her in the past and the way he was with Tanya despite being in love with someone else.A pretty complex character,but,quite interesting too.

 Allusions
  a figure of speech in which an unrelated object is referred,
indirectly or directly in the book or the story concerned and
is left to the audience to make a direct link.

Following are some Allusions I noticed in The Silent Patient-

The Snowflake

 At the very end of the book and at the very beginning, Theo does something which gives us small insights upon his mental state.As we date back to his childhood going back to a date where his father was out for a business trip to America and this is a night when his mom was asleep in her room. He outstretches his hands out of the window to catch snowflakes as he watches them vanish on his fingertips. 

“It felt joyous and frustrating at the same time and spoke to some truth I couldn’t express, my vocabulary was too limited, my words too loose a net in which to catch it. Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness; an act of possession which instantly gives way to nothing.” 

Now, as we know by the end of the book that Alicia’s diary was found and Theo was about to be arrested for the policeman was standing in his house, sipping tea and He was about to meet his doom.But,they didn’t know Theo’s story,of how he never thought Alicia would kill him. How he wanted to know the truth about her husband and he thought Alicia would be able to talk it out with him. Even though his intention was not to destroy Alici’s life,he fucked it up anyways, cuz what he did to meet his intention was too much for Alicia since it had triggered a long-dormant trauma that would incite her to shoot Gabriel in the face. Now,he was nothing more than the mad person.It wasn’t Alicia who was mad.It was Theo, the ‘doctor’ who was mad.Who was still carrying his abusive father with him. All the time. Maybe he wanted Kathy,wanting to grasp on to his marijuana, but holding on to her love was like holding on to vanishing snowflakes, the love was gone,to Grabriel,and now, Kathy is silent,like Alicia,and Theo now lives in his childhood home, playing the role of his dad, in a loveless marriage with a depressed wife

Marijuana- 

Theo-“Marijuana contained me…someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of the life and this person ends up seeking unquenchable containment from external sources-needing a drink,joint-hence his addiction”

 So clearly Theo needed help.Kathy was Theo’s marijuana, “When I met Kathy and fell in love,marijuana faded into background” But slowly it came back and fucked things up more and more and more. 

Yuri’s Cue-

So Yuri,did he know the truth ? or any of The truth when he said he knew Alicia the most? If yes, what did he know? If not,why did he take Theo to a drink and say to him? 

“I saw her on the street, It took me a long time to get the courage to talk to her. I used to follow her…I’d watch her sometimes without her knowing. I’d stand outside her house and look, hoping she would appear at the window"

-This story was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. 

This may be just a co-incident and I wouldn’t have  assumed this to be a cue given by the author,a hint,a truth slantly spoken, in disguise unless the chapter ended with Yuri saying, 

“Go home to your wife.And leave Alicia behind”

An insight into Theo’s mind through Alicia-

 “I want to help you,I want to help you see clearly” 

At this Alicia looked up. She stared at me-right through me. 

“You can’t help me, her eyes shouted. Look at you, you can barely help yourself. You pretend to be so wise to know so much, but you should be sitting here instead of me. Freak.Fraud.Liar.Liar-” 

Until this part Theo is the ‘about-to-save-the-princes-hero’ to all of us, then why did he hear his mind calling him 

FRAUD 

FREAK

 LIAR. 

Because it was his inner antagonist speaking through Alicia,like he once himself had admitted.

"Her silence was like a mirror-reflecting yourself back at you,and often,it was an ugly sight."

MY UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

The ending of this book was perfect but it has left me with a bunch of unanswered questions

1. Where did Alicia’s gun go on the night of the murder? How did Theo get hold of that gun?

 2. Jean, why did Jean say to Alixia that she was in danger, that she should not trust everyone around her. 

3. Why did we see Yuri selling drugs and how was that even relevant?

TO SUMMARIZE IT ALL-

Psychological thrillers mainly are supposed to grasp your psyche by the throat and unleash it only after it has made you wake enough about yourself that not only can you get the words you just readout of your mind, but you also start coming up with new words and voices inside your head and feel them tangle up with each other forming a mess. In short, I couldn’t quite get the book out of my head, I kept thinking about all the events that were taking place and how one scene ended up to another scene and then to the final BIG PLOT TWIST.

I give it a 4 out of 5 stars cuz of One major con of this book was Theo using all the information he had acquired from Alicia’s Diary to call and threaten people, using it to his advantage. There weren’t many grounds of judgement left for us readers who might be the criminal if not Alicia,a deeper insight into the other characters,maybe from a different perspective would have been beneficial in leveling up the book. All the points in the world goes on to the author’s style of continuing two different storylines and timelines at the same time and managing to bring about such a clear clever ending and plot twist Readers who love having plot twists (major and yet real)will love it and I think they should give it a read.