46 pages • 1 hour read
The Silver Linings Playbook
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Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “An Infinite Amount of Days Until My Inevitable Reunion with Nikki”
A 30-year-old man named Pat is doing push-ups at “the bad place” (3) when his mother arrives. She asks if he wants to come home with her. Pat thinks about Nikki; through exercise, he is trying to build a new body that she will like. He agrees to come home with his mother “just until apart time is over” (4). Dr. Timbers tells Pat good-bye and tells him to enjoy his life. While driving away, Pat’s mother tells him that Dr. Timbers did not want to release him.
When they reach their hometown of Collingwood, Pat starts “to feel anxious, breathing heavily like [he] sometimes do[es]” (6). At home, Pat’s mother has created a home gym for him in the basement, with dumbbells, a bench press, and an abdominal exercise machine. Pat begins a workout, alternating between exercise and writing in his journal, “so that Nikki will be able to read about [his] life and know exactly what [he’s] been up to since apart time began” (7).
Upstairs, Pat sees that some removed the pictures of him and Nikki from the wall over the mantel where they once hung. His mother claims robbers broken in and stole them weeks earlier. Pat does not speak with his father during his first week at home. He remembers his father yelling at him “the only time he ever visited [Pat] in the bad place” (8). Pat reads The Great Gatsby because Nikki loves it, but he believes that Scott F. Fitzgerald wrote the book wrong “because there’s no silver lining at the end of that book” (9). Pat plans on surprising Nikki by reading all of the novels on her American literature class syllabus, which he believes will show that he is trying to save their marriage.
Chapter 2 Summary: “He Does Not Preach Pessimism”
Pat’s mother drives him to visit Dr. Patel, his new therapist. In the waiting room, Kenny G’s “Songbird” is playing through the speakers in ceiling. Pat begins “screaming, kicking chairs, flipping the coffee table, picking up piles of magazines and throwing them against the wall yelling ‘It’s not fair!’” (12). Dr. Patel walks into the room and invites Pat back to his office as Pat’s mother begins to clean the mess.
Dr. Patel—who tells Pat to call him Cliff—asks Pat to tell him about Nikki. Pat describes his “apart time” from Nikki: “A few months ago I agreed to give Nikki some space, and she agreed to come back to me when she felt like she had worked out her own issues enough so we could be together again” (14).
Pat believes their reunion is inevitable, even though their separation is ambiguous, and he is legally prohibited from contacting Nikki or her family. He envisions his life as a movie and tells Dr. Patel that he believes in happy endings. For the rest of the interview, Pat asks Cliff questions about his own family, then they talk about “how great women are and how important it is to treasure your woman while you have her” (17).
Cliff says that he is going to adjust Pat’s medication, and that Pat is to report any side effects to him. On the drive home, Pat’s mother begins crying when he mentions Nikki, but he does not know why. When they get home, his father is in his office with the door shut. Pat works out downstairs.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Orange Fire Enters My Skull”
Each morning Pat pushes his arms and legs through a trash bag—so that he will sweat more—and runs 10 miles. He looks at the sky: “[T]here will always be a silver lining that reminds me to keep on trying, because I know that while things might seem dark now, my wife is coming back to me soon” (19). He always pretends that he is running towards Nikki, and he enjoys imagining her expression when she sees that he has lost 50 pounds since they saw each other.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Worst Ending Imaginable”
Pat reads A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway after a librarian tells his mother that it is Hemingway’s best love story. The novel ends with a woman named Catherine dying of a hemorrhage after delivering a stillborn baby. Pat is disappointed in Nikki for teaching a book with such a terrible ending in class and cries: “Why not just tell high school students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing?” (22). Pat believes that Hemingway was right to kill himself after writing such a pessimistic book.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Got Nuthing’ but Love for Ya”
At the next appointment with Cliff, Pat says his new medication is working well, even though he has only taken half of the allotted prescription. Pat says that he hasn’t noticed any side effects. As he leaves, he thinks, “I figure weaker people probably complain about their drugs, but I am not weak and can control my mind pretty well” (24).
Pat is working out when he smells his mother cooking “crabby snacks” (24), which are one of Nikki’s favorite treats. He wonders if she is cooking them because Nikki is coming over, but the crabby snacks are for that evening, when Pat’s brother Jake is coming over to watch the Philadelphia Eagles NFL game with their father. Pat is nervous because his brother “said some really awful things about Nikki the last time [they] talked” (25).
During a run before the game, Pat sees an old friend, Ronnie. Pat runs away from him as Ronnie tries to talk to him. Ronnie did not visit Nikki and Pat in Baltimore, and he did not visit Pat in the “bad place,” so Pat does not want to talk with him. When Pat gets home, Jake is there. Jake is surprised at Pat’s physique, and Pat enjoys the compliments, even though he is still angry that Jake never visited. Jake gives Pat an Eagles Jersey with the number 84 on it, the number of the Eagles’ wide receiver Hank Baskett. Jake says that he bought them season tickets, so Pat can wear the jersey to the games.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Concrete Donut”
Pat’s father does not look at him or speak to him as the game begins. When Pat asks about the Eagles’ new stadium, his father does not answer. Pat doesn’t know that the former stadium—Veterans Stadium, known as “The Vet”—was demolished two years earlier. Jake shows him a video of the demolition on his laptop. Their father continues to ignore Pat, who thinks: “He hates me. He looks repulsed, like it is a chore to sit in the family room watching the game with his mentally messed-up son” (31).
Pat thinks that the demolition on the video is a hallucination because of the date. His mother tells him that it is 2006, which means that Pat is 34, not 30, and that “[a]part time would have been in progress for four years” (32). Pat screams that they are all hallucinations and grabs his mother’s shoulders. Jake tells Pat he was in the “bad place” for four years and demands he let go of their mother.
Chapter 7 Summary: “I Fear Him More Than Any Other Human Being”
Pat begins sleeping in the attic because it is hot and will make him sweat more. He hears synthesized chords and opens his eyes to see Kenny G in the attic with him: “Mr. G might not seem evil, but I fear him more than any other human being” (35). When Kenny G begins playing “Songbird,” Pat hits himself on the forehead to make it stop. Pat’s parents come to the attic and try to restrain him. Pat knocks his mother down, so his father punches him in the face. Then he tells Jeanie that Pat has to go back to the hospital in the morning. Pat falls asleep with his head in her lap. The next morning, she tells him he does not have to go back to the “bad place.”
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Dress-Up Dinner”
Ronnie visits Pat in the basement. He apologizes for not visiting Pat but reminds him that he wrote letters to him. He invites Pat to a “dress-up dinner” (39) the next night, even though Pat thinks that Veronica, Ronnie’s wife, hates him.
Chapter 9 Summary: “If I Backslide”
Pat tells Cliff about the dinner. Cliff encourages him not to worry about what he wears and instructs him to wear the Eagles jersey if he likes it. They discuss how aggressive Pat has been with his mother—“shaking her in the kitchen and knocking her down in the attic” (42)—and Pat sobs for five minutes. Cliff raises the dosage of Pat’s medication and says further episodes will require him to return to the neural health facility. Pat promises that he will stay in control.
Chapter 10 Summary: “I Don’t Know How This Works”
Pat’s mother gives him flowers and a bottle of wine to take to the dinner. Veronica greets him and introduces him to her infant daughter, Emily. Pat and Ronnie drink beers on the porch, although Pat is not supposed to drink alcohol while taking his medication. Ronnie tells him that Veronica has invited her sister, Tiffany. Tiffany’s husband, Tom, died while Pat was hospitalized, and Ronnie tells him not to mention it. While Veronica and Ronnie prepare the dinner, Pat and Tiffany talk in the living room. He tells her that she is pretty.
Dinner is awkward. Veronica and Ronnie talk while Pat and Tiffany are silent. When Tiffany does talk, it is only to say that she hates football more than anything. When dinner ends, she asks Pat if he is going to walk her home. Tiffany lives with her parents, in an addition to the back of their house. She says that Pat can have sex with her if they leave the light off, but he shows her his wedding rings, citing that he is not willing to cheat on Nikki. Tiffany hugs him, and they both cry for 10 minutes. When he gets home, his mother tells him that Ronnie has been calling.
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
Although Pat is a 34-year-old man, he uses childlike terms—such as “the bad place” (3) and “apart time” (4). His language portrays a sense of naivety, particularly when applied to places and situations as serious as the mental hospital and his separation from Nikki. Pat begins the narration from inside of a mental hospital, which immediately identifies him as an unreliable narrator. His obsessive exercise routine—as well as his certainty that a new, healthy body will help him win back Nikki—give important clues to Pat’s irrational thought processes as well as his extreme optimism.
Pat’s surprise at how much Collingswood has changed in his absence foreshadows his eventual realization in Chapter 6 that he has been in the hospital for years, not months. At home, he immediately begins compulsively exercising and reading books on the literature curriculum that Nikki teaches. Obsessiveness is a theme that runs throughout the novel, and Pat’s focus on Nikki is unsettling. Much of the book’s initial tension comes from the reader’s growing awareness that Pat is going to learn (or remember) things about his relationship with Nikki that will distress him. When his mother claims that a robber stole his wedding pictures from above the mantel, she is protecting both herself and Pat from his potential reactions if she were to tell him the truth too early.
Pat’s initial trip to Cliff’s office lays the foundation for their working relationship and introduces the symbolism of Kenny G and the song “Songbird.” Until the moment when he begins screaming in the waiting room, Pat has seemed erratic and intense, but not dangerous. Combined with the coming episode in the attic, and when he shakes his mother in the kitchen, his outburst in the waiting room foreshadows the gravity of the crime that led to his time in the mental hospital.
Because Pat is mentally ill, his claim that his life is a movie directed by God can be taken as literally true to him, but it can also be argued that it is a coping mechanism he uses to stay optimistic, as is his preoccupation with silver linings. The reader gains more clues about Pat’s actual reality from the way the other characters react to him, rather than from what he says about himself and his situation.
When Pat finishes reading A Farewell to Arms, he is appalled that Nikki would teach something so pessimistic to high school students. He does not understand how something can be considered a classic work of art without being optimistic. This thought is at odds with his claim that his life is a movie since not every movie has a happy ending. A story without a character that must struggle has a poorer chance of achieving a satisfying story arc. A Farewell to Arms ends badly for the main characters, despite their best efforts and the genuine love they share.
In Chapter 5, when Pat claims that he can “control [his] mind pretty well” (24), it is a justification for not taking his pills as instructed. There are no signs that Pat can control his mind, his temper, or his reactions. He is obsessively committed to things like running and lifting weights for hours. Despite his claims that he will do anything to improve himself to win Nikki back, his dedication does not extend to something as potentially helpful as taking his medication.
When Pat watches the football game with Jake and his father, he shows more self-awareness than before. Before the reader knows more about Pat’s history, his father’s shunning of him is cold to the point of appearing cruel. Pat looks at his father and thinks, “He hates me. He looks repulsed, like it is a chore to sit in the family room watching the game with his mentally messed-up son” (31). Pat acknowledges that he is mentally damaged—or at least, that his father sees him as such.
Pat’s hysterical reaction upon learning that he has been hospitalized for four years, and his terror over the appearance of Kenny G, make his father’s demeanor more sympathetic. Within a week of returning home, Pat shakes his mother in the kitchen and knocks her down in the attic. The next morning, Pat vows to do better, but he acts more out of a fear of being hospitalized again than out of regret for frightening—and almost injuring—his mother. The management of Pat’s moods takes the priority in the household, which will wear increasingly on his parents.
The dinner party where Pat meets Tiffany is a pivotal scene for them both, although Pat does not know it yet. As the story progresses, Tiffany will be shown to be as out of control as Pat, but in different ways. She begins to focus on helping Pat with the same single-minded effort he thinks about saving his marriage. When they cry together, it foreshadows their eventual acceptance of each other as well as their ability to understand each other better due to their mental illnesses.
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