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
Thursday, July 24, 2053 (Henry is 42, Clare is 82). Henry time travels to an unknown place in an unknown time. He walks down a dark hallway to the door of a well-lit, white room he can see at the end. In the room he finds a woman drinking tea and looking out the window. She is elderly with long, white hair. He feels she looks familiar. The set of her shoulders makes her look weary to Henry. As he studies her, the floor creaks below his feet, and she becomes aware of his presence. He sees immediately it is Clare. She smiles and comes toward him.
The story jumps ahead multiple decades, to the time-traveling episode that Henry described to Alba in an earlier chapter. Clare has lived many years without Henry, but, seemingly for the first time, Henry has managed to time travel to see her. Throughout the book, the color white has symbolized the possibility of fresh starts and the absence of suffering. The fact that Clare sits in a white room suggests that, while she may have continued to pine for Henry after his death, she has managed to find a way to live in his absence.
Themes
Clare sits by the window and considers the aftermath of last night’s storm. The yard is covered in downed tree branches, and the sand of the beach beyond the grass has been leveled out. The day is bright, and flowers are blooming. Clare explains that she is waiting for Henry the same way she does every day, looking out to the lake. In some ways, waiting feels the same way now as it did when Henry was alive. She worries that being constantly vigilant for him will somehow keep his visit from happening, but she knows she can do nothing but anticipate it. She believes he will come to her; in the meantime, she waits “here.”
The closing scene of the novel reinforces the novel’s central theme: that separation and yearning strengthen rather than diminish love. Clare has spent her entire life waiting for Henry—before their life together in the present, during their time as a couple in the “here and now,” and after his death. Though this has pained and frustrated her at times, ultimately her waiting has only confirmed and sustained the vibrancy of her love for him—and love becomes itself a figurative “here and now,” transcending both time and space.
Themes
