59 pages • 1 hour read
Matthew BlakeAnna O
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaCharacter Analysis
Dr. Benedict “Ben” Prince
Content Warning: The source material features discussions of psychosomatic disorders and trauma.
Ben functions as the story’s protagonist who changes and grows from an intellectual, caring, and thoughtful professional into a jaded, disgraced, and fearful man. Ben is shown as well-educated, shy, empathetic, determined, lonely, and regretful. He shows his intelligence often, such as when he explains sleep disorders to characters like Donnelly and Harriet with expertise:
Resignation syndrome is a functional neurological disorder […] It’s not an organic disease of the brain, as such, but of the psyche itself. The common feature across all continents and timelines is that patients suffer from resignation syndrome when confronted with the total absence and removal of hope (67).
He’s renowned as a professor and expert in his field, and his lectures and books are well-known in the academic community—all of which show his wisdom and passion for his job. Despite Ben’s successful career and care for his patients, he feels stagnant before working with Anna, his big break. Though Ben retains his analytical, intelligent mindset throughout the novel, he at first believes Anna may be an innocent victim of a sleep disorder. Despite his experience as a consultant on many crimes, Ben gives Anna the benefit of the doubt because he knows she could have been sleepwalking and is not aware of her actions. By misjudging Anna as a victim and patient instead of a criminal, Ben puts himself and his family at risk, which costs him his career and home in London.
Ben’s biggest challenges and flaws revolve around his sense of failure, regrets, and underestimating others. He wishes he and Clara could have worked through her affair and continued to give Kitty a safe, happy home. This sense of loss and defeat propels Ben to do his best with Anna to gain recognition, more respect from Clara, and more time with Kitty. He often feels as though he can be better, constantly striving for improvement as a sleep therapist, father, and ex-husband. Because Ben strives for success with each patient and believes in the truth, he can’t let Anna go. He chooses to protect her from the justice system when she awakens, despite the risk, which shows his courage. Even after he’s framed, he shows perseverance, intelligence, and a craving for objective truth because he wants to solve Anna’s mystery. Although Ben wants to be Anna’s savior (as per Fairy Tales: “Sleeping Beauty” and Her “Prince”), he becomes Clara’s scapegoat. In the end, Ben dies as an innocent man, but his death protects Clara from being discovered as the real Patient X and villain.
Anna Ogilvy
As a complicated young woman with a sleep disorder, Anna functions as the main secondary character, a victim of a crime, and an unexpected adversary for Ben. Anna is creative, obsessive, anxious, vengeful, and smart. She shows these qualities through her notebook entries, which offer an unfiltered, raw look into Anna’s internal thoughts, feelings, and actions. The entries display Anna’s descent into obsessive, violent tendencies and unhealthy sleep disorder: “The poor unfortunate whose demonic tendencies only surface at night. I was on my way to being someone else. A full reinvention. Now I am back to that old me. The Werewolf. The Walker” (188). Her fear of sleep creates insomnia that causes more sleepwalking in a vicious cycle. Anna’s sleep disorder embodies most directly the theme of The Significance of Sleep and Dreams. When Anna wakes up with the knife over Douglas, her intense horror confirms she wouldn’t consciously hurt her friends—but later her frustration leads her to make comments about how Doug, Indira, and her father will pay. Because Anna refuses to lose Elementary and is devastated by her father and Indira’s affair, she believes she only has her writing and revenge left. Her vengeful words foreshadow her growing angst but don’t confirm she wanted to be violent, especially because her ideas are contrasted with her distress waking up with a knife over Douglas.
Not only does Anna’s sleepwalking create the premise of the plot, but her rare situation provides the major dramatic questions: Did she kill her friends while sleeping? And if so, is she culpable for a crime she committed while unconscious? These central questions are key to the theme of Defining and Pursuing Justice. Because Anna is used as a pawn by Clara (drugged and commanded to kill), she believes she can’t rightfully be tried. In fact, Anna remakes herself with a firm belief in her innocence because she wasn’t in her right mind. By owning her traumatic past, Anna can write her memoir with confidence, insight, and healing by “reclaiming” her narrative. She’s changed from the frightened, non-confrontational young woman (since she wouldn’t talk to Indira and Doug about the merger) into a more callous, assertive person. Anna shows character growth when she purposefully kills Ben because she never planned to be violent to Indira, Douglas, or her father. Back then, she only wanted Elementary back and to confront the conflicts—but with Ben she makes the wrong conclusions to avenge the trauma she thinks he caused. In the conclusion, Anna is the famous writer she always wanted to be, a goal she finally achieved. Though she processes her friends’ death as not being her fault, she must live with the secret that she killed Ben, though she has no remorse because she views herself as the objective hero of her story.
Clara
Revealed as the person behind the Patient X alias, Clara functions as Ben’s love interest and the secret antagonist. She is described as smart, mature, cold, pretty, and excellent at her job in law enforcement because she is detached and immune to violence. In Bloom’s case notes, Clara is mature for her age, shown as she talks about profound ideas of loss, power, and intent. She reads voraciously, responds thoughtfully to Bloom, and admits she has violent thoughts. Even back then, Clara confessed to being vengeful against her school bullies and wanting power. Secretly, she had the capacity to kill from her teenage years onward. Clara murdered her stepbrothers and blamed the crime on her mother, actions that show she is cold, ruthless, and remorseless.
As she ages, Clara retains her ability to compartmentalize her sins as necessary. She never once shows that she regrets murdering her stepbrothers, framing Anna, or losing Ben. For instance, although she’s sad Ben was sacrificed, she doesn’t grieve him and admits she sent Anna after him: “Anna’s pursuit of Ben was useful [...] Clara deserves some of the credit. Clara steered Anna towards the idea during their interviews for the book, letting the idea of scopolamine enter the conversation” (419). Clara also selfishly thinks that now she won’t have to deal with Ben pleading for joint custody of Kitty. Instead of feeling guilty about her crimes or her role in Ben’s death, Clara feels safe and free at last. Anna’s book lets her walk away as a criminal without any suspicion. Her carefully calculated, 20-year-long plan to avenge her mother succeeded, proving Clara is the clever, manipulative, and satisfied architect of chaos.
