Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory and Meaning
Love and Vulnerability
Freedom
Art, Creativity, and Expression
Wonder and Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France. July 29, 1764. The driver offers to take Addie farther, but Addie says she can walk the rest of the way. As Addie walks the last mile to Villon, she wonders why she’s returned—to cleanse herself of her past? As “a ritual of sorts,” perhaps?
Though Addie now has the freedom of mobility she’s long desired, she voluntarily returns to Villon again and again, suggesting that she’s willing to give up some degree of freedom to prioritize the love and human connection that bind her to Villon.
Themes
Addie reaches the village and realizes how much it has grown in her absence. She heads straight for her old house. The old yew tree is still at the end of her old street. Years have passed, but the tree looks the same. But as Addie gets closer to her house, the illusion of sameness falls apart. She opens the front door of her father’s shop and finds that her father’s old tools are rusted over, and the shop is filled with cobwebs.
All that Addie has given up to have her freedom surges to the forefront in this scene, in which Addie sees how her home (and presumably her parents) have grown old and decayed in the years since she made her deal with Luc. The decay reinforces all the years with them that Addie has lost in order to have her freedom, and it’s unsettling. Addie, in a sense, has become the unchanging yew tree she always longed to become—the tree that represented freedom to her.
Themes
Addie sees smoke rise from the chimney of her old house; someone still lives there. Addie knows she should go, but she can’t help herself. She walks toward the house. The door opens just a crack, and Addie sees her mother’s wrinkled face. Addie’s mother opens the door all the way. “Do I know you?” she asks Addie. Addie thought she’d already distanced herself emotionally from her mother, yet the hurt of her mother’s failure to recognize her hurts just as much as it did before. She also realizes that her father is already dead. Addie apologizes to her mother. Then she walks away.
Addie has experienced and learned so many things that would have been entirely beyond her grasp, had she remained in Villon and grown old alongside her loved ones. And yet, these experiences she’s had are not meaningful enough to counteract the hurt and grief she feels at experiencing, once more, her own mother failing to recognize her. This section reinforces the reality that Addie’s freedom isn’t free: she has paid for it with the love and human connection she’s missed out on cultivating over the years.
Themes
