The Time Traveler's Wife

“I stayed there for a while, trying to feel sleepy, and then I stood up and everything changed.”

Henry alludes to the first time he time traveled after the night at the museum. Young Henry gets out of bed and takes his first trip through time. The sense of everything changing is not just Henry’s time traveling, but everything that comes with it—anxiety, his relationship with his mother, who doesn’t believe him, and his sense of stability within the universe.

“Mom laughed and said that time travel sounded fun, and she wanted to try it, too.”

After Henry returns from his time travels, he tells his mom. Her response is the first of the many similar responses, making him reluctant to tell anyone the truth. Time traveling, in addition to putting Henry in physical danger, isolates him emotionally.

“I would realize that the words were only in my head, and everything would go on as before.”

Henry and a version of himself from a different time discuss why they can’t change past events. In this case, they are referring to a time when Henry sees a girl get hit in the head by a hockey puck and eventually dies. Whenever he returns to the scene of this accident, he recognizes what will happen and that he should do something—but he cannot. In the novel, the universe seems random and indifferent. What is the point of time travel if one can’t change the past?

“He said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.”

Henry refers again to a conversation with another version of himself. What he says establishes a theory for how fate and free will operate within the text. That said, one questions whether one really does have agency in their present. Clare makes choices, such as in getting pregnant. However, the narrative introduces a child version of Alba before Clare gives birth, suggesting that Alba’s life is fated. Similarly, child Clare meets adult Henry, who is married to her in the future, implying that her life’s path is set.

““Maybe I’m dreaming you. Maybe you’re dreaming me; maybe we only exist in each other’s dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other.”

Henry tells Clare this and unintentionally raises the question of what is real and what is imagined. Clare asks Henry to pinch her, a request that she thinks proves his hypothesis wrong.

““Well, if you are feeling boxed in by the idea that your future is unalterable, imagine how I feel. I’m constantly running up against the fact that I can’t change anything, even though I am right there, watching it.”

Henry says the above to Clare. Again, we see how he views fate as a force that cannot be controlled or overcome. He also does not recognize Clare’s feelings, how she might be struggling to accept the future as he tells it.

“Stillness is a discipline.”

Henry says this wishfully. Though he would like to be able to achieve it, he can almost never find the means to be still. He moves both literally through time and emotionally through his anxiety.

“One of the best and most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.”

Henry’s time travel is a blessing and a curse. Unlike his father, Henry can see Annette alive. At the same time, he doesn’t get to choose how he sees her, such as when returning to the accident.

““Stress—pure fear. I think my body did the only trick it could.”

Henry answers Clare’s about how he escaped the car accident that killed his mother: Stress and fear triggered him to time travel. This also suggests the cause for his other trips through time.

“But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say I’m sorry until it is as meaningless as air.”

Henry says this on Christmas Day on the anniversary of his mother’s death. He describes grieving and the fear of moving on. He equates remembrance as a burden and way of honoring the dead. Niffenegger creates emphasis by repeating “even if.”

“I never chose Henry, and he never chose me. So how could it be a mistake?"

Clare thinks this to herself as she tries to understand how fate has intervened in her life. She also follows up these internal thoughts by recognizing that the question she asked cannot be answered.

“‘But don’t you think,’ I persist, ‘that it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?’”

Clare asks this rhetorically of Richard, who has a hard time disagreeing. It also foreshadows how Henry will die after he and Clare are happy for a short period of time. These lines form the heartbeat and moral center of the novel: Though we may live in an absurd and indifferent universe, love is what makes life worth living. Intense love, though short, is better than a lifetime of mediocrity and blandness.

“Call it whatever you want. Things get kind of circular, when you’re me. Cause and effect get muddled.”

Henry tells Dr. Kendrick this after Kendrick asks if fate brought Henry to him. Henry’s answer is open, even though he visited the future and knew that Kendrick was the doctor who would ultimately help him. This is characteristic of the novel, which does not definitively answer whether fate exists.

“I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground.”

Henry is visiting Kendrick. He must take a step back and allow Kendrick to process the information that Henry provides him with, that he is a time traveler. Henry shows that he is aware of how his reality is vastly different from others.

“I try not to think about the policeman’s description of Henry jumping off the end of the pier, caught in the beam of the police car searchlight. I try not to think.”

Henry has disappeared again, and this time the police have spotted him. Clare’s insistence on not thinking recalls Henry’s comments earlier in the novel about stillness; Clare tries to remove the noise in her head to calm herself and refrain from worrying. Niffenegger again uses repetition for emphasis and drama, repeating “I try not to think.”

“Risking death and despair, turning lovemaking into a battlefield strewn with the corpses of children.”

Henry describes his aversion to Clare’s insistence on having a baby after she has miscarried five times. The image of the child corpses implies that, for Clare, the act of creating a child is irrational, and a force of death rather than life.

“The drawing is finished. It will serve as a record—I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you—long after I am gone, and Henry is gone, and even Alba is gone.”

Clare suggests that art is a stand against life’s transience. The act of creating is the artist’s attempt to leave something behind that survives their own demise. Niffenegger uses characteristic repetition, repeating “I”— “I loved you, I made you, and I made this for you.” This underscores the role of the “I,” the individual. Niffenegger also highlights loss, repeating “gone.”

““It was early. A day in the fall. Daddy and Mark were out deer hunting. I woke up; I thought I heard you calling me, and I ran out into the meadow, and you were there, and you and Daddy and Mark were all looking at something, but Daddy made me go back to the house, so I never saw what you were looking at.”

Clare tells Henry that she remembers an incident from her childhood when she heard gunshots. Disoriented, she could not piece together the details of what had happened, although Henry knows and does not correct her. This foreshadows Henry revealing this as the cause of his death.

“Like an angel. Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul.”

Clare recites the lines from Rilke that Henry first cited for her when she was younger. She recalls the words as she creates a paper sculpture of an angel for Henry, which symbolizes how she has come to see him in her life—a being of beauty who is also terrifying in his mystery.

“If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice, she would rise like Lady Lazarus from her stubborn death to solace us. But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her.”

Henry is speaking of his mother. He recognizes that no amount of will can bring back the dead, that once death comes, we are powerless to stop it. How the living carry on with their lives in the absence of their loved ones is one of the book’s central themes. While Henry is able to physically see his mother again, the last line of the passage indicates that need can bring anyone to the dead, at least in memory or dreams.

“She’ll be okay without me, I think as I watch her, but I know that she will not.”

Henry says this while watching Clare. He knows the impact that death can have on the living and understands what Clare is in for when he dies. He tries to help her by writing the letter revealing that they see each other again, but the letter may only perpetuate her longing.

“What an uncertain husband I have been, Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus alone and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a plaything of the gods.”

Henry’s reference to The Odyssey is significant. If he is Odysseus, then Clare is Penelope, the faithful and loving wife who waits for her husband’s return. Penelope’s faith in their reunion is rewarded when Odysseus finally returns home. This foreshadows the end of the novel.

“It’s dark now, and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”

These are the last words of Henry’s letter to Clare. Henry’s message that “time is nothing” contrasts with how people normally view time, as powerful and tactile.