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
Addie and Henry have fun playing pinball. Addie makes a high score, and Henry enters her name (albeit misspelled as ADI) into the machine. Addie hopes that her name can stay there forever.
Addie’s sheer joy at seeing her name written on a screen for all to see underscores the important role that self-expression and memory play in making a person’s life meaningful. With her name on the pinball machine’s screen, she’s metaphorically become more real.
Themes
After the speakeasy, Henry says it’s Addie’s turn to choose what’s next. Addie takes Henry to The Nitehawk, one of her favorite theaters in Brooklyn. She buys two tickets to North by Northwest. Addie senses that Henry isn’t enjoying himself, and he admits that he finds the movie a bit slow. Addie tells him to just wait—it’ll be worth it. Henry asks if Addie has seen the movie before, and when she says it’s one of her favorites, Henry abruptly leaves the theater, claiming he needs some air.
It's unlikely that Henry hates Hitchcock films vehemently enough to leave with no notice, so the reader may assume that something else is up. The earlier scene, which alluded to Henry’s watch that doesn’t tell time, implied that Henry has some kind of hang-up about time, and maybe that’s what’s going on here: he’s uneasy at the prospect of wasting time on a slow film—particularly one that Addie has seen before. It’s as though doing so makes Henry and Addie’s time together less sacred or meaningful.
Themes
Addie follows Henry outside, and a fight ensues. Henry is angry that Addie has taken him to a movie she’s seen before. Then he apologizes; it’s not Addie’s fault. It’s just that he always feels like life is passing him by, and he wants to use his time as wisely as possible. Addie grabs Henry’s hand and tells him she’s taking him “somewhere new.”
As a 20-something, Henry is quite young, and so it’s rather unreasonable (though not unheard of) for him to be so anxious about wasting his life away. This section suggests that there’s something causing Henry’s time anxiety that he has yet to reveal to Addie. Still, his pathological need to experience “new” things while he has the time is something of a variation on Addie’s wondrous outlook on the world: both characters are driven by a need to see all there is to see, though Henry’s need, more so than Addie’s, is driven by fear and anxiety.
Themes
