The Time Traveler’s Wife, a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, follows a couple through their somewhat-atypical love story: Henry, one of the protagonists of the novel, has a genetic disorder that makes him slip through time. He cannot control this time-slipping, and the fact that he can travel through time causes his relationship with the other protagonist, Clare, to be unusual. However, for the unusual and difficult nature of their relationship, Henry and Clare’s relationship lasts in the long term. Niffenegger utilizes the idea of time travel as a metaphor for love, loss, absence, fate, aging and death; the use of time travel as a literary device is a powerful one, and she expresses the pain of randomness through the way in which Henry slips through time.
One of the major themes of the novel is the relative nature of time. Henry, who is described as “chronologically-impaired,” sees his time-slipping as a problem; he has rules about what he tells his past self, and refuses to let his past self know the future, lest he change it. However, moreso than the actual physical time-traveling, the ways in which Henry and Clare describe their perceptions of time are very interesting. When Henry and Clare are together, both repeatedly remark on the ways in which time seems to move much more quickly, and then when they are apart, it moves slowly. During one instance while Henry is gone, Clare says: “Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?” (Niffenegger 167). Clare’s pain at the loss and the agony of the wait is a metaphor for death; Henry dies a thousand little deaths throughout the novel, leaving each time where Clare cannot follow him, into the ambiguous abyss that she cannot quite comprehend. In this way, Niffenegger has created a metaphor for the pain that people feel when they lose loved ones; Clare suffers the pain of loss over and over again, but she also experiences the rebirth of love every time Henry returns.
The act of time travel itself is an effective metaphor for death and the relationship between Henry and Clare acts as a very convincing foil to the concept of death and rebirth. However, the time travel is also a convincing metaphor for the very idea of love. Niffenegger writes: “There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love” (Niffenegger). The transient nature of love is reflected through the way that Henry, and later his daughter, can navigate through time and space.
Clare and Henry’s love withstands the pain of a thousand little deaths over the years, and becomes stronger for the absences that his time travel causes. They argue, cry, and love together, much like a normal couple would; they try for a child and fail multiple times. However, they are fundamentally different from a normal couple, at the same time, given that Henry can, at any time, disappear and move back or forward in time to a place Clare has already been, or a place that Clare has yet to be.
Clare struggles with being the one who stays all the time, especially after Henry’s death; she implies that she is constantly waiting for him, as he has told her that she will see him one more time before she dies, although he begs her not to spend her life waiting for him. However, the trials that they faced together in their relationship formed an unbreakable bond between them, and Clare does spend much of her life (or so it is implied) waiting for one final goodbye from the man she loves.
Niffenegger uses this plotline to examine the ways in which fate and chaos converge; she questions whether anything is truly preordained, or if life is subject to randomness and chaos from which patterns sometimes emerge. Henry travels randomly through time, and maintains the illusion that he acts based on free will; however, the story does raise the question of whether Henry’s “free will” is actually free will, or if he is compelled to act by some unknown guiding force. When he meets Clare for the first time in his timeline, she has already known him as the man she will marry for many years; he, however, has no knowledge of her yet. This begs the question of whether or not he could have ever chosen not to marry her, and what would have happened if he had chosen not to marry her.
Because they experience time differently, Henry and Clare experience aging in different ways. Clare ages in a linear fashion, in the same way that the reader does; Henry’s aging is scattered throughout time, and he experiences the touch of time differently. Clare understands that she will have to wait for Henry; her whole life is tinged with waiting, while his is defined by the way he is torn from moment to moment. Niffenegger writes, ““Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment” (Niffenegger 203). Though they experience aging and time differently, they both come to the same conclusion: happiness is best when it is lived in the moment.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a complex text, and the message that each reader takes away from Henry and Clare’s relationship will be marked by the relationships they have had in their lives. By utilizing time travel as a metaphor for a variety of different things, Niffenegger has created a relationship that the reader can see him or herself reflected in, and can relate to extremely well.
Works cited
Niffenegger, Audrey. The time traveler's wife. San Francisco, CA: MacAdam/Cage, 2003. Print.
