The Breakdown

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-15

Chapters 16-21

Chapters 22-26

Chapters 27-29

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Impact of Guilt and Fear on Mental Health

Tragedy intrudes on Cass’s life when she realizes that she was probably the last person to see Jane alive before her murder. The thought that she might have intervened and prevented Jane’s death creates overwhelming guilt. Then the gaslighting and harassment begin, and Cass’s belief that the killer is after her results in a near-constant state of terror. Her first-person narration reveals a rich interiority that explicates the effects of these emotions on her mental health and stability. The novel isn’t subtle about identifying the emotions under the microscope: “But it isn’t dementia that has robbed me of my independence, I realize […] It’s the guilt and fear that have riddled my every waking moment since I drove past Jane’s car two months ago. It’s guilt and fear that have diminished me” (199). Cass’s conflict with her unidentified tormentor and her experience of guilt and fear lead to physical pain, paranoia, depression, shame, and hopelessness, painting a clear picture of the havoc that prolonged guilt and fear can wreak on the human psyche.

Cass often uses figurative language to describe her experience with guilt or fear in terms of physical symptoms. Her secret about seeing Jane on Blackwater Lane feels as if it’s burned on her skin. When she senses someone watching her at the mailbox, her terror “knots [her] insides and turns [her] limbs to jelly” (101). These similes and metaphors demonstrate an awareness of how emotional health correlates with physical health. Guilt and fear aren’t feelings that Cass can separate from her mind and body so that they can’t harm her, and their emotional toll eventually manifests in physical ways. Maintaining hypervigilance also takes a huge toll on her strength and energy, but she’s unable to turn it off. Chronic fear makes Cass paranoid. Even though she knows she won’t be taken by surprise in her garden, which is surrounded by a six-foot hedge, she still has trouble choosing where to sit because she’s terrified that someone will creep up on her.

In time, Cass becomes so depressed that all she wants to do is sleep. She has been unable to resolve her guilt and shame for so long that she has lost any sense of control over them, so she turns instead to escapism. The sedative pills offer this escape, and she sinks into it. However, she feels ashamed of this, ashamed of giving up, and ashamed that she wasn’t strong enough to stop her problems from taking over her life. Her shame only increases her guilt and depression, making the problem worse. This vicious cycle eventually causes hopelessness. At times, she “can’t imagine the guilt ever going away” and calls it “too high a price to pay” (24). Later in the book, she can’t envision things getting better and longs for her mother to assure her that everything will be all right. Cass must resolve her conflicts and eliminate the sources of her guilt and fear before she can begin healing. Even then, she knows it will take time.

How Gaslighting Weaponizes the Fragility of Memory and Perception

Not every type of manipulation and deception can be considered gaslighting. Both the mechanisms and goals of gaslighting are specific. It involves psychological manipulation intended to make someone question their own senses and comprehension of reality. The target eventually adopts the perpetrator’s version of the truth and becomes more dependent on the perpetrator and easier to control. To achieve this, a perpetrator can’t simply give someone false information and insist that it’s the truth. Successful gaslighting requires undermining someone’s trust in their own sense of identity and reality. To achieve this, perpetrators rely on the fact that memory and perception are subjective and vulnerable to external influences, allowing the perpetrator to infiltrate the victim’s psyche and wage war from within.

Matthew and Rachel’s early efforts to make Cass question her memory are cautious. For example, Rachel convinces that Cass she agreed to purchase Susie’s gift by elaborating on a conversation they actually had. The presence of a real memory of this conversation in Cass’s mind allows her to accept the lie as plausible. Planting cash in her drawer provides further evidence to convince her. Matthew’s claim that Cass ordered the alarm system works for similar reasons. At first, Cass feels sure she didn’t agree to have the system installed, but then she realizes that she can’t remember everything that happened during her interaction with the salesman: “I want to believe more than anything that the salesman tricked me into it. But when I think back to when we were in the kitchen together, I realize that I don’t remember very much at all” (75). Cass’s fear distracted her at the time, and the resulting fuzziness of those memories leads her to accept Matthew’s version of what occurred.

The scene with the kitchen knife causes Cass to mistrust her most basic source of information about reality: her vision. Matthew and Rachel use an object they know will elicit a strong emotional response—the knife Cass associates with Jane’s murder—because it will diminish her focus and capacity for rational thinking. Since the people she trusts have no apparent reason to lie about this, Cass believes that she imagined the knife. If she can no longer trust that what she sees is real, Cass’s entire sense of herself and the world around her loses meaning. A comment Cass makes to Rachel demonstrates the long-term effects of this manipulation on her memory and perception. Rachel asks what Matthew thinks about Cass taking the pills, and Cass responds, “He wasn’t too keen at first but he’s come round to the idea” (188). Though it was Matthew who convinced Cass to take them in the first place, she now remembers things differently. She has internalized the blame for what’s happening to her and embraced the version of reality Matthew portrays, in which he’s the supportive husband who’s concerned for her health and just wants what’s best for her. Memory and perception are so central to understanding reality and navigating day-to-day life that when Cass believes hers can’t be trusted, she becomes powerless.

The Erosion of Honesty and Trust in Relationships

The ultimate loss of trust in Cass’s relationship with Matthew occurs when she discovers the truth on Rachel’s burner phone. Before this point, however, readers can see how Matthew’s invalidation and dismissal of Cass’s feelings erodes her sense of trust in the relationship and her ability to be open and honest.

In Chapter 14, Cass sees a knife in her kitchen that looks just like what news reports indicated Jane’s murder weapon looked like. She begs Matthew to call the police, knowing what she saw and knowing the knife shouldn’t be there. When he reports the only knife present is a small paring knife, Cass observes, “He makes a show of looking around, humoring me, and I know he doesn’t believe there ever was another knife. And I start weeping pathetically, from despair that I’m going mad” (119). This is one example of an act that plays out again and again: Matthew is convincing in his perfectly balanced performance as a husband who’s loving and supportive but believes deep down that Cass is losing her mind and that her memory and perception can’t be trusted. In time he changes his response from pity to frustration, making Cass even more fearful to tell him the truth about what she’s experiencing. She believes that what feels real to her will only sound like hysteria and paranoia to him.

By not believing what Cass is telling him, not trusting her judgment, Matthew erodes her trust in him and makes it easier, even necessary, for her to be dishonest with him. She finds it easy to lie to Matthew about why she didn’t wake him up when he was late for work: “‘No, otherwise I would have woken you up.’ The lie slips easily out of my mouth” (133). Later, she flees the house in terror because of her tormentor, forgetting to change out of her house shoes, grab her purse, and set the alarm. Because she’s ashamed of her fear and worried it will upset Matthew, she tells numerous lies that evening to hide the truth: that her purse is in her car, that she wore proper shoes and just now changed back into house shoes, and that she decided not to set the alarm because she was only going on a quick shopping trip. She goes without the pills that subdue her terror on weekends because she doesn’t want Matthew to see how sedated they make her. Cass no longer trusts her husband not to judge her. In turn, the frequency with which Cass now forgoes honesty compounds her guilt and wears on her mental well-being and sense of self. The weakened relationship causes harm to Cass, and the psychological damage in turn causes more harm to the relationship, creating a vicious cycle that eats away at the structure of their marriage.