Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Time Traveler’s Wife, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Here and Now
Love and Absence
Free Will vs. Determinism
Language and Art
Self-Love
Summary
Analysis
September 2000 (Clare is 29). Clare has a nightmare where she finds a duckling in her grandmother’s basement. The duckling asks her why she abandoned it. Clare then dreams that she is holding a baby while walking through her hometown with Lucille. When the baby gets too heavy to carry, Lucille shoulders the weight. The nightmare switches again, and Clare finds herself waiting for the train while holding a bag that contains a stillborn baby. She dreams she wakes up in her parents’ house, which is emptied of all the furniture except for an empty baby cradle. When Clare goes into her mother’s room, she finds a white sheet on the floor. She bleeds on it, and the red spreads quickly to cover the floor.
Clare’s dreams somewhat mirror Henry’s time-traveling episodes. Where Henry’s condition involves him physically traveling to times and places that are relevant to conflicts he’s struggling with in the present, Clare travels figuratively, in her dreams, to work through issues she’s struggling with in her waking, conscious life. Here, Clare seems to be working through her unresolved grief for Lucille and her anxieties about becoming pregnant and carrying a child to term. The white sheet she encounters in her mother’s room represents Clare’s desire for a fresh start, and the red blood she bleeds on it represents the many issues in waking life that are standing between her and the possibility of a fresh start.
Themes
Sunday, September 23, 2000 (Clare is 29, Henry is 37). Clare describes feeling isolated in her pregnancy. She compares it to living underwater in a diving bell with her unborn baby, sheltered from the elements but out of reach of everyone else. She worries constantly that the baby will die, but Dr. Montague assures her the baby’s heart is beating. Henry tries to help in the ways he can. Clare finds herself uninspired to continue the “hopeful” projects she started before the pregnancy. Instead, she uses red paint to cover a sheet of paper. After it dries, she draws a black anatomical heart, thinking about hearing the baby’s heartbeat in the doctor’s office. When she come inside, she tells Henry she feels better.
In the novel, water symbolizes Clare’s relationship to others. When Clare compares her pregnancy to living underwater in a diving bell, then, it reinforces how alienating an experience pregnancy is for her. She feels alone in her struggle and constantly frets over her inability to fully control the outcome. When she paints red over the sheet of paper, meanwhile, it symbolizes her need to externalize and thereby confront these struggles. She seems to grasp that in times of great personal struggle, she can be her own greatest and most effective source of comfort.
Themes
Wednesday, September 27, 2000 (Clare is 29). Clare finds her baby lying on her bed. He has left her womb too early to survive, though she watches him try to breathe as he bleeds from the umbilical cord. To Clare, it seems as though he is “drowning in air.” She hopes Henry will arrive in time to see him alive, but the baby vanishes from her hands. When Clare can feel the baby moving once more in her stomach, she stays very still. When she wakes up in the hospital again, Henry is with her, but their baby has died.
Throughout the novel, water symbolizes Clare’s relationships with others. When she describes her baby as “drowning in air,” then, imagining a body of water between them, she is expressing her helplessness to help her suffering child. This scene is rather surreal. The surreal elements of this scene—the vanishing baby, its return to Clare’s body—symbolically suggest Clare’s struggle to be in the here and now and accept the reality of losing yet another pregnancy.
Themes
