75 pages • 2 hours read
The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
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Symbols & Motifs
The Devil/Hell
During the initial onset of Lori’s illness, she likens it and the Voices to demons and the devil. She has repeated fantasies/delusions of the Voices dragging her into the depths of hell to be tortured and raped. These fantasies match the vitriolic violence that the Voices hurl at her, and their constant wish for Lori’s destruction and death. Too, Lori finds herself seeking darkly-themed music and the figure of Charles Manson in her early attempts to both understand and escape her disease. The Devil and Hell therefore symbolize Lori’s early attempts at drawing a corollary between something known and the complete confusion that the onset of her disease causes.
The Quiet Room
The Quiet Room is both the title of the book and an important motif in it. We first see the appearance of The Quiet Room when Lori is being treated at the White Plains branch of New York Hospital. The Quiet Room is a motif that morphs in its significance through the narrative, in tandem with Lori’s journey toward wellness.
In its first iteration, The Quiet Room is a place of tyrannical punishment and torture. Lori is stripped and administered sodium amytal before being forced to enter it due to extreme behavior, and the staff member who watches her through a window and a rigged mirror acts like a cold jailer. This is a corollary to Lori’s overall experience at New York Hospital. For one, Lori herself is actively fighting her own treatment through her denials of her un-wellness. Secondly, the medical and psychiatric approach at New York Hospital is characterized by the totalitarian and punitive functions of The Quiet Room itself.
However, when Lori encounters The Quiet Room at 3 South, she has entered an entirely new phase in her self-knowledge and treatment. Partially because she has finally emerged from denial, and partially because the treatment approach at 3 South is a much more humane one, The Quiet Room metamorphoses into a place that Lori voluntarily goes in order to collect and compose herself. Too, at 3 South the staff members watching her function not as cold jailers, but as casual friends. These elements converge to allow Lori to take advantage of the therapeutic benefits of the solitary Quiet Room and also demonstrates a key change in her journey toward recovery.
The 9925 Key
The 9925 key is the master key that the doctors in charge at 3 South use. Therefore, it directly symbolizes mastery and freedom. When Lori is poignantly presented with the 9925 key at the end of her treatment at 3 South, the key becomes a potently triumphant symbol that represents the long, hard, fight with schizophrenia that she has emerged victorious from. No longer needing to be housed within 3 South, she is poetically presented with the key, which unlocks the ward. She does not need to be literally kept under lock and key any longer. Although she will never be the person she was prior to the onset of her illness, she can now emerge from the hospital with the tools and ability to undertake a functional and fulfilled adult life that at least approaches normalcy.
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