THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF SILENCE IN THE SILENT PATIENT

Abstract

This paper applies Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the discursive construction of silence in Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient. Rather than treating silence as a psychological symptom or narrative device, the study conceptualizes silence as a form of meaning shaped through language, institutional interpretation and ideology. With the help of a qualitative CDA method, textual excerpts of the novel selected are examined at three levels: textual (lexis, modality, transitivity), discursive (narrator authority, institutional genres and intertextuality) and social (power relations, gender ideology and psychiatric control) levels. The results show that silence is linguistically produced by agency-repressing grammatical structures and evaluative lexical options and institutional discourses, especially psychiatric and managerial discourses, constitute silence as pathology and risk. At social level, the analysis shows that women silence is gendered and pathologized, which relies on culturally passed-down discourse that justified control and surveillance. The paper goes further to suggest that silence is a discursive resistance in that its regulation reveals institutional reliance to speech as a means of knowledge production. On the whole, this paper has shown the analytical value of the Fairclough CDA framework in the discovery of how the modern literary works reproduce and challenge the hegemonic ideologies surrounding the voice, power and normality.