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
Friday, February 2, 2007 (Clare is 35). After Henry’s death, Clare can’t get out of bed. She declares sleep to be her new “lover,” distracting her from everything else that is so painful. She ignores the phone and all other noises. Sleep also disorients her sense of time, blurring past and present, life and death. She no longer cares how she looks nor wants anything.
In her grief, Clare turns her back on the world and becomes symbolically as out of place and time as Henry was during his travels. As always, Henry’s absence makes Clare feel her love for him acutely, but unlike all the previous times he has left her, this time he will never come back to her.
Themes
Kimy comes into Clare’s room to tell her Alba is home from school. Alba joins Clare in bed. She touches her Clare’s face, which makes Clare cry. When she reflects on Alba’s resemblance to Henry, Clare has to turn away. Eventually, she rises to shower and eat dinner. After Alba falls asleep that night, Clare decides it is time for her to go through Henry’s desk. She retrieves a stack of papers and reviews them. At the top of the pile, she finds a letter addressed to her.
Clare’s inability to look at Alba reflects her continued unwillingness to accept the reality of Henry’s death. Alba, in her resemblance to her father, is an explicit reminder of Henry and of all Clare has lost. However, Clare’s choice to go through Henry’s desk suggests that she may start to cope with the reality of his death in healthier ways. And her discovery of a letter addressed to her is a promising sign—throughout the novel, characters have turned to art and words to communicate with loved ones outside of time and beyond the grave. Perhaps reading the letter will give Clare the comfort she desperately needs in Henry’s permanent absence.
Themes
In his letter, Henry describes his view of the backyard from his desk as he writes. The cold and dark of the winter day slows things down in a way he associates with time traveling; in that moment, he feels like he is swimming on the surface of time. He tells Clare that he senses his remaining days are dwindling. He knows that she is likely reading this because he has died, and he wishes that his death was uncomplicated and quick. Henry remarks that his letter must sound like a suicide note, but he assures her that he would have stayed with her if he could have found a way.
Henry’s letter brings to life the sights and sensations he experienced in the moment in which he wrote it, even though he is no longer around to express those feelings to Clare. In this way, his words allow him to transcend time and space more than his time traveling ever did.
Themes
As the letter continues, Henry declares his love for Clare. He tells her that it was his one constant through the treacherous, unpredictable years of his life. He apologizes that loving him has required her to be so patient and to wait alone so much of the time. He begs her not to wait for him anymore once he is dead—to find a way to love and live in the world fully again. He recounts the way his mother Annette’s death ate away at his father Richard’s happiness. Henry tells Clare that he knows “absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.” He doesn’t want her to spend a sad life missing him like that.
Henry’s letter allows him to convey his love for her from beyond the grave. It also gives her the encouragement and support she needs to find a way back into the world in the aftermath of her great loss. Citing Richard’s broken state in the aftermath of Annette’s death as an example, Henry suggests that while absence can be a positive thing, making one feel their love for their absent partner more acutely, Clare shouldn’t let her love and grief for Henry consume her to the point that she cannot exist without him. Henry recognizes that Clare has spent her entire life waiting for him and that it’s finally time for her to start living on her own terms. He wants her to be a free, winged bird rather than a trapped, “dark bird.”
Themes
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Finally, Henry tells Clare about one last time-traveling experience. He describes how the summer before his death, he was pulled from Kendrick’s office through time to a place he had never been before. At the end of a hallway, he entered a white, light-soaked room. An elderly woman was there drinking tea by the window. When he made a noise, she turned; he saw that it was Clare as an old woman. He felt it was a gift to get to see all the years she will continue to live through written on her face. In the letter, Henry tells Clare the rest of the details will have to wait for the day he comes to visit her in the future. He ends his letter by telling her he loves her and declaring that “time is nothing.”
Throughout the novel, the color white has represented the possibility of fresh starts, and so it’s significant that Henry finds a future version of Clare seated in a white, light-soaked room—it indicates the possibility of a fresh start for Clare in the aftermath of Henry’s death. Though she may always grieve his absence, she will find a way to live without him, and to not let the pain of his absence consume her with longing to the point that she feels isolated from the world around her.
Themes
