Who Owns The Truth? Silence And Post Truth Story Telling In Michaelides’s The Silent Patient

Abstract

The issue of the ownership of the truth in The Silent Patient (2019) by Alex Michaelides is embedded in a post-truth environment in which emotional persuasion regularly prevails over objective facts, and in which silence is not inertial but tense, and serves as the most formidable power in narrative. This study explores three related aspects of truth construction in the novel: the meaning of silence as strategic telling of stories in a post-truth context; how framing and narrative strategies contribute to creation of multiple irreconcilable versions of truth; and how fake news, misinformation, disinformation, perspectivism, and social constructivism helps to bring to existence multiple, irreconcilable versions of truth. By tight textual reading around the main passages such as Theo confiding that he was forcibly made to do it, so that Alicia would never speak again, discovery of her diary, hidden between the back of the painting, and alternate understandings of her work as both a happy one and a disturbing one, there is an argument that The Silent Patient is a diagnosis of something but not a cure. The novel shows that in the conditions of post-truth stories, oral truth is instantly exposed to usurpation, pathologization, and weaponization, and silence achieves impregnability over the story of a person. Finally, the ownership of the truth is a permanently unsolvable problem, raising the possibility that the quest to seek single and objective truth is conceptually incongruent within systems: therapeutic, legal, and interpersonal that systematically put in place an alternative emphasis on narrative over factual control.