Story of Your Life Summary & Analysis

That the alien speech sounds to Louise like a dog shaking itself dry suggests the aliens may be radically different from humans—they are truly “other.” This suggestion is reinforced when Louise points out that humans may need technology even to hear and reproduce the aliens’ language. Meanwhile, Colonel Weber’s refusal to give Louise any additional helpful information about the recording creates a first impression of the military as a suspicious and uncooperative force in the story. 

Colonel Weber’s interest in how much the aliens might know, as well as his desire to withhold information about human language from the aliens, suggests a suspicious, fearful, even xenophobic attitude toward them. Louise’s attitude is much more academic and pragmatic: she simply explains who will be able to learn the aliens’ language and under what conditions the aliens could learn human language.

This passage explains the ominous hint made earlier in the story about Louise’s child’s “departure”: Louise remembers that her daughter is going to die young. By describing her daughter’s death as more significant than the opportunity to meet aliens, Louise reveals how much her daughter means to her while preserving an emotionally restrained tone.

Everything about this description reveals that the military fears the aliens and wants to control access to them: the army camp around the looking glasses, the military cameras recording the civilian researchers, and the reports Louise will be required to write on the aliens’ language acquisition. By contrast, Louise maintains an observant calm.

The heptapods’ advanced technology, their non-humanoid appearance, and their surprising mode of locomotion all underscore their “otherness” relative to humans. Their bodies, especially their many eyes, hint that their worldview and modes of perception may be radically different from humanity’s. Despite this sudden introduction to an extremely alien species, Louise draws analogies to previous fieldwork that she has done, suggesting that she is undaunted by the heptapods’ difference.  

While the description of the heptapods’ speech as “fluttering” highlights their difference from humans, their eventual understanding and mimicry of Louise’s point-and-question procedure suggest similarities as well. The slow and arduous process of establishing a common vocabulary, meanwhile, emphasizes not only the difficulty of learning a new language but also Louise’s professionalism. 

Again, the arduous process of recording and labeling the heptapods’ utterances emphasizes both the difficulty of language learning and Louise’s professionalism. That no one knows how many languages the heptapods have underscores how little the humans know about the heptapods, while the suggestion that they may have multiple languages foreshadows the introduction of another one.

Louise’s inability to reproduce heptapods’ sounds with her human physiology underscores the radical physical differences between humans and heptapods. It also hints that there may be other, invisible differences between humans and heptapods yet to be discovered.

This aside reveals that Louise has a sense of humor: every year, she tells her students a joke about how English obtained the word for kangaroo, even though she knows the joke is probably not based on a real incident. It also reveals that Louise will attain a measure of fame for her work with the heptapods.

Again, Louise displays her sense of humor, this time applied to parenting: she is able to find joy in future memories of her young daughter’s linguistic mistakes. That Louise can find joy in memories of her daughter despite also knowing about her daughter’s early death suggests that for Louise, happiness in parenting might be powerful enough to outweigh grief.

This flashback illustrates the different attitudes the researchers and the military personnel take toward the heptapods. Whereas Louise is focused on communicating with the heptapods, Colonel Weber is still suspicious of them and convinced that humans should be limiting what the heptapods learn.

Again, this passage shows the difference between the researchers’ and the military’s attitude toward the heptapods. Whereas Colonel Weber is hesitant to communicate with these outsiders, Gary is genuinely curious about the heptapods. The passage might also imply a degree of sexism from Colonel Weber: he won’t grant a female researcher’s request until a male researcher backs her up.

This passage illustrates the different uses to which language can be put. Whereas Louise and Gary have been trying their hardest to communicate clearly with the heptapods in the flashbacks, here Louise’s daughter and her friend Roxie plan to use coded language to conceal their meaning from a third party. Thus, language can be used to confuse others—and conceal things from them—as well as to communicate with them.

Here Louise’s daughter uses language not only to conceal from Nelson her appraisal of him but also to joke around with Roxie and her mother about her ability to sense the weather. Jokes, including private jokes between friends or between parents and children, are another example in the story of speech intended for reasons other than communication, such as humor or intimacy.

Louise’s inability to pronounce the heptapods’ real names once again underscores their otherness and the genuine difficulty humans have communicating with them. At the same time, nicknaming the heptapods gives Louise another opportunity to demonstrate her sense of humor. While she could have named her heptapods something functional, such as Heptapod 1 and Heptapod 2, she chooses to give them whimsical nicknames.

While the narrative has just underscored the heptapods’ radical difference from humans, Flapper and Raspberry’s ability to perform actions approximate to Gary’s emphasizes the similarities they do share with humans. Meanwhile, that the heptapods write subjects and verbs as a single logogram suggests that they may think differently about action than humans do.

That the logograms look “melted together” to Louise implies the difficulty that she is having in interpreting the heptapods’ written language, even relative to the difficulty she has had with their spoken language.

Gary’s ideas about the relationship between the heptapods’ language and their bodies suggests that the heptapods might think as differently from humans as they look. Notably, however, Gary does not react to this revelation with suspicion, as Colonel Weber might do. Instead, Gary finds it interesting.

The “primitive” nature of human technology compared to heptapod technology underscores the radical differences between the two species and may partly explain why the military finds the heptapods so threatening. That Louise feels closer to the heptapods than her colleagues both indicates Louise’s openness to communicating with the alien “others” and hints that Louise might grow even closer to the heptapods as she continues to learn their language.

That the heptapods have a nonlinear writing system suggests they might think differently about concepts such as linearity, time, and cause and effect. Louise’s speculations about the heptapods indicate that she is not totally immune to the military’s suspicion of the heptapods: she wonders if they’re hiding information about their writing or have stolen their writing system from another species. That said, she seems to lend most credence to the idea that the heptapods’ writing system is “true writing,” which underscores her basic openness to trusting the aliens. 

This passage illustrates the difficulty that Louise will have parenting her daughter after her divorce. The passage also illustrates Louise’s intellectual engagement with the mysteries of parenting, something that Louise does throughout the story. Despite knowing a great deal about her future daughter, Louise still finds herself pondering why her daughter makes different choices than the ones Louise herself would have made.

This new revelation about the heptapods’ language deepens the mystery surrounding it: why do the heptapods have two completely distinct languages for writing and for speaking? Louise will have to struggle with this uncertainty as she continues to research the linguistic differences between the heptapod’s verbal and written languages—a task that is made all the more difficult by the fact that human verbal language is directly correlated to human written language.

Heptapod B highlights both the similarities and the differences between heptapods and humans. On the one hand, like the heptapods, humans have also created semasiographic writing systems. On the other hand, unlike the heptapods’ writing systems, human semasiographic writing systems are “specialized,” not generally used. This difference suggests further differences in the ways that heptapods and humans think.

Louise speculates that discovering the reasoning behind the heptapods’ two languages will reveal a lot about them. In turn, she implies that language is not merely a vehicle for communication but an expression and a shaper of worldviews. Meanwhile, her admonition to Gary that “patience is a virtue” foreshadows the importance that time and anticipation will have in the story. 

This passage hints at Louise’s attitude toward her knowledge of the future. While knowing what will occur in the future could make someone bored with life, Louise does not seem to have this reaction. Instead, her anticipation of what she knows will happen creates more “fun,” even joy, for her. This is the lesson she attempts to impart to her daughter as her daughter waits impatiently to go to Hawaii.     

The comparisons of Heptapod B to art, psychedelia, and hypnosis all imply that the language is not merely a vehicle for communication but an experience in its own right, an experience that may affect the consciousness of those who speak it in unexpected ways. How Heptapod B will affect Louise’s consciousness remains to be seen.

On the face of it, Louise’s astonishment at her daughter’s maturity here seems strange. After all, Louise seems to remember the entirety of her daughter’s life. If she knows everything that is going to happen to her daughter, how can her daughter astonish her? This reaction points to the difference between an objective knowledge of facts and a subjective experience of time passing. Louise knows all the objective facts of her daughter’s life, yet her subjective experience of her daughter is still capable of surprising her. Meanwhile, the passage also expresses both the difficulty and the love that Louise experiences as a parent: she doesn’t understand or share her daughter’s ambitions but still genuinely wants her to be happy.  

This passage introduces yet another mystery concerning the heptapods. The heptapods have more advanced communications technology than humans and are capable of space flight, yet they find basic human math and physics confusing. Again, the story is foreshadowing cognitive differences between the heptapods and humans.

Once again, the strangeness of the heptapods’ languages reflects the strangeness of their mindset. Despite their best efforts, the humans cannot parse the heptapods’ motivations for visiting Earth. Although the heptapods say they want “to see,” they confusingly do not display curiosity in the form of asking questions. Predictably, the government personnel in the story react to the heptapods’ strangeness and inscrutability with suspicion, trying to conceal information from them in order to protect humanity from any potential threat the aliens might pose—a threat that is, at this point, seemingly nonexistent.

Like the passage about Louise’s daughter’s college graduation, this passage illustrates the difference between Louise’s objective knowledge of what will happen and her subjective experience of time passing. Because Louise knows the future, she should be able to easily keep up with her daughter’s phases. Yet, in her subjective experience, Louise is always a step behind. This passage also emphasizes the difficulty and conflict in Louise’s relationship with her daughter; though Louise loves her daughter, they will not always get along. 

Here, the story provides a partial explanation to the mystery of the heptapods’ incomprehension of human math and physics. The breakthrough in physics communication suggests that the problem was not that the heptapods do not understand physics, but that they understand physics differently from the way humans do. The humans were simply not communicating about physics in the right way.

That the breakthrough in physics communication between heptapods and humans occurred in a discussion of Fermat’s Principle of Least Time is notable because it's an earthly principle—that is, it’s a scientific idea that applies to the physics of life on earth. By using a familiar scientific framework, then, the physicists have managed to identify the ways in which human physics does and does not apply to life for the heptapods. This comparative method is similar to what Louise does as a linguist: she uses what she knows to find out more about what she doesn’t know.

This passage reveals that whatever the reason behind the heptapods’ difficulty understanding human math and physics, it is not because the heptapods’ own understanding of math and physics is primitive: they are able to understand physics concepts that require advanced calculus. Thus, the difficulty is most likely due to a problem in communication or to the radical differences between human and heptapod modes of thought.

Yet again, the passage is underscoring the radical “otherness” of the heptapods relative to humans. What is complex to humans is simple to heptapods, and vice versa. The full explanation of Fermat’s Principle of Least Time that Gary supplies here also foreshadows the importance of the idea of extremity—minimums and maximums—later in the story.

Up to this point, Louise and Gary have had an increasingly close collegial relationship. Now Gary seems to be making a romantic overture. The story suggests that the effort Louise and Gary put into understanding the heptapods also brings them closer together.

This passage poignantly emphasizes the vulnerability of parenthood. Louise will experience great joy at having generated life, the way a fountain or a wellspring generates water. At the same time, however, she will constantly feel her daughter’s pain. The passage is especially poignant in its evocation of the daughter’s childhood falls, since Louise knows that later, a much larger fall will end her daughter’s life.

Louise’s thoughts in this passage make explicit what the story has been hinting throughout, namely, that heptapods’ radically different take on physics and math is just a symptom of their radically alien worldview, which the humans do not yet understand.

This passage highlights the difficulties that come along with parenting—especially parenting teenagers. It also underscores the extent to which parenting is largely a process of letting go, as parents are forced to live with certain developments in their children’s lives that they might not necessarily approve of. Of course, Louise will also have to let go of her daughter in a much more profound and heartbreaking way when her daughter eventually dies at the age of 25. 

At this point, the story has already mentioned that the heptapods have free word order in their spoken language and nonlinear script in their written language. To understand the heptapods, the humans are still trying to find some linearity, some “particular order,” in the heptapods’ language. The alienness of literally translated heptapod (“inequality-of-size rocky-orbiter,” etc.) hints that the linguists may fail in imposing a humanly explicable order on the heptapods’ “otherness.”

Here Louise has discovered something strange about Flapper’s relationship to language and time: as a condition of writing Heptapod B, Flapper seems to have to know in advance how entire very complicated sentences are going to turn out.

Like the earlier scene in which Louise claims that all fathers have difficulty with their daughters’ maturation, this joke suggests that parenthood is destiny. No matter what parents do, no matter what choices they make, the end result will be the same: their children will blame them for everything. That Louise enjoys this joke suggests that she is able to find humor even in the more painful aspects of parenthood. 

This flashback reveals the progression of Louise and Gary’s relationship: they have started going on regular dinner dates, during which they discuss their progress in their respective areas of research. Attempting to understand the heptapods has indeed brought them together. And yet, they’ve both stopped trying to learn more about each other’s respective fields, hinting at a dynamic that could lead to a certain disconnect in their relationship down the road.

By implication, Fermat’s Principle of Least Time seems to remind Louise of Flapper writing in Heptapod B. Just as the ray of light has to know its destination before it begins its journey, so Flapper has to anticipate the entire complicated sentence it is going to draw before it can begin writing in Heptapod B. This parallel implies the difference between human and heptapod understandings of physics. Whereas humans think in terms of cause and effect, heptapods think in terms of goals.  

Once again, Louise’s thoughts about her daughter highlight the difficulties of parenting. They also invite readers to question why Louise doesn’t try to do something to change the outcome of the future—she seems to know everything that will happen to her and her daughter in vivid detail, but she doesn’t seem particularly motivated to help her future self avoid hardship, though this is perhaps because she knows she can’t change the future.

This passage explicitly states a point that has been hinted at elsewhere in the story, namely, that language is not only a vehicle for communication but also something capable of shaping the thoughts people have. Because the story has already established that the heptapods think in radically different ways from humans, readers might be curious to know how learning the heptapods’ languages, in particular Heptapod B, could change the way Louise thinks.   

Learning Heptapod B alters the way Louise perceives time. Rather than continuing to think in a linear, human way, she begins to adopt the heptapods’ nonlinear, “all at once” worldview. Louise emphasizes that Heptapod B alters her consciousness when she compares thinking in Heptapod B to meditation, a practice often undertaken to help alter the way people think (or the way they approach their own thoughts).

This passage illustrates a different side of the guarded attitude that the military and government personnel have toward the heptapods. Whereas the military personnel fear the heptapods and want to conceal information of them, the other government personnel want to exploit them for economic gain. Hossner is not genuinely interested in communicating with the heptapods—he just wants to somehow benefit from their arrival. Gary, in mocking Hossner, represents the position of the scientists and other researchers who oppose the government’s close-minded attitude and do genuinely want to understand the heptapods.

This passage heavily implies what readers may have already suspected: Gary is the father of Louise’s daughter. The passage also illustrates another side to Louise and her daughter’s relationship. While many of Louise’s thoughts about the future show her in conflict with her daughter, this one shows her daughter genuinely appreciating her help. Louise’s experience of parenting will thus contain joy as well as pain.

This moment clarifies the power dynamics between the researchers and the government personnel in the story. The researchers like Gary and Louise, who are genuinely interested in communicating with the heptapods, wish that they could avoid thinking about the government personnel and their agendas. Unfortunately, the government is the one who controls the researchers, and the researchers can’t just ignore them and make them “go away.” Gary and Louise are therefore reduced to venting their feelings in sarcastic comments.

None of the humans seem truly to understand what the heptapods mean when they say they came to Earth to observe. Yet the researchers like Burghart are willing to take the heptapods at their word and try to understand them, whereas the government personnel like Hossner take a cynical approach and refuse to believe the heptapods are telling the truth. Gary and Louise, powerless to change the government’s viewpoint, have essentially given up on persuading people like Hossner.

Here Louise spells out several points that the story has previously hinted at. The heptapods’ radically different take on physics indicates their radically inhuman viewpoint more generally. The difference in human and heptapod viewpoints turns on the two species’ different perceptions of time; that the two species perceive time so differently suggests that time is not an objective reality but a subjective experience. Because the languages to which we have access shape the way we think, Louise, by learning the heptapods’ languages, in particular Heptapod B, is transitioning from a fully human to a more heptapod-like viewpoint. 

Like the passage about fathers unable to handle their daughters’ maturation and the passage about Louise’s favorite joke, this passage suggests that parents in some sense lack choices and free will. Although Louise previously intended to act differently from her own mother, when confronted with her actual child’s difficult behavior, she finds herself repeating stock mom phrases and imitating behavior she remembers from her own childhood.

At this moment, the story tackles head-on the question that may have been lurking in the back of readers’ minds: if Louise knows the future, why doesn’t she act to prevent the bad outcomes she foresees, such as her divorce or her daughter’s death? That Louise explains the relationship between knowledge of the future and free will through an extended parable suggests both Louise’s academic bent and the complexity of the topic. 

Here Louise speculates that foreknowledge of the future, not an ordinary part of human subjective experience, would lead the people who do experience it to react in ways that are not an ordinary part of human psychology: in other words, rather than trying to avoid the bad outcomes they foresee, they would feel “a sense of obligation” to enact them. Since Louise does in fact seem to know the future, her speculation here implies an answer to the question of her attitude toward her divorce and her daughter’s death. She does not take action to prevent them because she feels an obligation not to.

Louise and Gary are growing still closer. Whereas before they ate together at restaurants, Gary now invites Louise to his house for the first time. Their closeness is the result of their shared work on and fascination with the heptapods.

In light of ordinary human views about parenthood, Louise’s description of her own feelings here seems strange. She compares her instinct to buy the bowl, which she knows will later put her daughter in the emergency room, to her instinct to protect her daughter. This strange, almost paradoxical comparison emphasizes the extent to which Louise’s foreknowledge of the future has nullified her free will and, as a result, alienated her from expected parental behavior.

Once again, Louise attempts to understand the radical differences between humans and heptapods, this time by drawing on a comparison from her own field of study, linguistics. This comparison underscores that language shapes worldviews. By comparing the laws of physics to an ambiguous sentence, Louise makes it clear that she sees both human and heptapod interpretations of the world as legitimate: neither one is better than the other. Louise’s generosity toward the heptapod’s viewpoint stands in stark contrast to the close-mindedness displayed by military and government personnel throughout the story.  

Louise’s recurring dream about her daughter’s death, in which Louise screams and attempts to prevent the fall, reveals her grief and trauma. Although Louise doesn’t try to prevent her daughter’s death due to her own loss of free will, she still cares very deeply about her daughter. Her failed attempt to save her daughter in the dream may express a subconscious regret that her foreknowledge of the future prevents her from acting to change it.

The transition from Louise’s description of her recurring dream about her daughter’s death to Louise sitting up suddenly in bed implies that Louise has just had the dream. That Louise begins dreaming about her daughter’s death before her daughter’s birth—during the period of time in which she communicates with the heptapods—implies that her ability to “remember” the future is related to the fact that she’s learning Heptapod B. In turn, the story suggests that language can profoundly shape the way people think.

This memory tightens the link the story has forged between parenthood and the loss of free will. Due to her loss of free will, Louise is unable to modify her protectiveness toward her daughter, despite suspecting that this protectiveness will prompt the behavior that leads to her daughter’s death. Yet protectiveness is such a natural parental instinct that it is not clear Louise could have modified her behavior even if she still technically retained free will. Thus, the story suggests that foreknowledge of the future and parenthood both produce instinctive responses that override free will.   

This passage reiterates that the strangeness of the heptapod language to humans results from the different ways humans and heptapods experience time. As Louise is beginning to think more like a heptapod due to learning Heptapod B, the story may be implying that in the nonlinear way Louise narrates her daughter’s life, Louise too is straining against “the confines of sequential speech” to express a “simultaneous mode of consciousness.” 

In this passage, Louise speaks with a double meaning. Although she seems to be joking when she affirms that she can see right through Gary, readers realize that in some sense it is literally true: because Louise can remember the future, she knows everything that Gary will say and do in her presence before he says or does it. The eeriness of her double meaning emphasizes how learning Heptapod B has changed Louise’s subjective experience of time and made it more alien, more like a heptapod’s.

Louise is a linguist, so she values the written and spoken word. Here, though, she generously and respectfully describes the communicative ability of her speechless infant daughter, acknowledging how her daughter expresses suffering without using words. This acknowledgment suggests that the generous, curious attitude Louise takes toward communicating with the heptapods also characterizes her communication with humans who are unlike her. Interestingly, although Louise never explicitly regrets her own ability to remember the future, her claim that living in the present tense is “an enviable state” implies that she sometimes wishes she had a different subjective experience of time, one that did not foist knowledge of tragic future events on her.

That Heptapod B has given Louise the ability to remember the future (and, in so doing, stripped her of free will) serves as a powerful example of language’s ability not only to facilitate communication but to determine worldview and subjective experience. Once again, Louise takes a generous and even-handed attitude toward human and heptapod differences: she acknowledges that relative to each species’ viewpoint, their beliefs about time and free will are legitimate. Yet her comparison of free will to an “optical illusion” suggests that free will is not a characteristic of objective reality, but a subjective phenomenon created by humans’ mode of experiencing time.

As previously mentioned, the story makes clear that language is not only a vehicle for communication but also something that shapes how people think. Now, though, the story adds a new element to this idea: namely, that language is not only a means of conveying information, but also a means of doing things. For example, a marriage wouldn’t “count” unless the appropriate words are said. With this in mind, Louise points out that language can “actualize” something, or make things happen. Language is therefore not just a mode of description, but an actual constructive tool that can be used to build the concepts that lie at the heart of human life.

Coming after Louise’s discussion of the heptapods “us[ing] language to actualize,” this memory suggests that the heptapods’ use of language is less alien to humans than readers might think. Like the heptapods, Louise’s daughter already knows the words in the story she is going to hear, but also like the heptapods, she still wants to hear them. Language, for the heptapods and for Louise’s daughter, is not about conveying new information but about performing a certain action. 

The difficulty that the humans experience in understanding the heptapods’ gift-exchange ceremony emphasizes how alien, new, and inscrutable the heptapods’ culture is to them. Louise’s sensation that she is “performing in a play,” meanwhile, provides yet another analogy to describe how heptapods and other speakers of Heptapod B experience language in the absence of free will: they are like actors reciting lines.

Throughout his conversation with Louise, Colonel Weber is focused on whether the humans can extract something of value from the heptapods, either by direct request or by manipulation. He is not really interested in understanding the meaning of gift-exchange for the heptapods. This lack of interest in the heptapods once again demonstrates the xenophobia and lack of openness to the alien “other” that military and government personnel display throughout the story. This attitude contrasts with the attitude of the heptapods themselves, for whom “the value of the exchanged items is irrelevant.” Unlike the human military and government personnel, the heptapods do not seem to want to manipulate or exploit their human counterparts. 

Colonel Weber is interested in extracting valuable information as well as other items from the heptapods, hence his disappointment that the heptapods are not sharing novel physics concepts with the humans. It seems that Louise is being ironic when she tells Colonel Weber she thinks he’s had a good idea, as the idea for the “gift-giving ceremony” was originally the heptapods’, not Colonel Weber’s. Louise is using humor to vent her feelings about the government’s attitude toward the heptapods.     

This passage suggests that the power of language to reshape consciousness has limits. While Louise’s consciousness has changed as a result of learning Heptapod B, she thinks not entirely like a heptapod but like “an amalgam of heptapod and human.” Her nonlinear subjective experience of time, specifically her ability to remember the future, is an example of this amalgamated human-heptapod perspective. On those occasions when Louise accesses something closer to a pure heptapod perspective, her experience of time is not merely nonlinear but absent: she is “outside time.”

That the heptapods repeated human information back to the humans as a gift suggests that heptapods may have a different idea of what constitutes a gift than humans do. This suggestion adds to the sense of the heptapods’ “otherness.” It is notable that the government reacts with anger when the heptapods do not give a more valuable gift, suggesting an entitled, narrow-minded attitude toward them, as well as a lack of genuine curiosity about what their behavior might mean.

Colonel Weber’s comment, “Maybe we’re finally getting somewhere,” shows that Colonel Weber does not value communication with the heptapods in and of itself. He feels that simply making first contact with an alien species, which ought to be an astounding experience, does not constitute “getting somewhere.” This attitude exemplifies the close-mindedness of the military and government personnel in the story. Throughout most of the story, Louise has demonstrated her disagreement with the government’s attitude by modeling openness and curiosity toward the heptapods. Here, for the first time, she overtly expresses distrust and fear of human governments.

Louise’s comparison of herself and Burghart to spies trading “carefully bland exchanges” underlines how Heptapod B has changed her relationship to language: whereas language for Louise used to be primarily a mode of communication, it is now a form of acting. The comparison to “spies” also suggests that Louise and Burghart have switched allegiances. While they seem to be employees of the human government, their sympathies are in fact with the heptapods.

In science, “transmutation” is the process of converting one element into another. Yet the word has associations with the pseudoscience of alchemy, where it refers to transforming a base metal into gold. The alchemical connotations of the word “transmutation” suggest that “transmutation at a distance” is technology so advanced as to be almost magical. This shocking development, together with the mystery of the heptapods’ departure, emphasizes once again how foreign and inscrutable the heptapods are to the humans in the story.  

That Louise uses the same words to identify her daughter shortly after birth and to identify her daughter in the morgue suggest how her subjective experience of time (that is, remembering the future) has shaped her experience of parenthood: even in moments of great joy, Louise still subconsciously dwells on her daughter’s death. 

The near-magical transformation of the looking glasses into “completely inert” silica and the unresolved mystery of the heptapods’ reasons for visiting Earth emphasize the alienness of the heptapods’ technologies and motives. Notably, although learning Heptapod B has made some humans think more like heptapods, their heptapod-like consciousness is not enough to decode the mysteries of the heptapods’ behavior. This detail points to the limits of language’s ability to reshape consciousness. At the same time, though, it’s arguable that the heptapods actually did give humans useful information, even if the humans technically already knew that information. What the heptapods give back to the humans is essentially common knowledge in translation, but because their language is so different (and because language shapes thought), these translations have the potential to provide new insight into the things humanity has taken for granted.

Louise’s wish that she could “immerse herself fully in the necessity of events” suggests that she hasn’t fully embraced the future she knows is coming. In other words, it suggests that Heptapod B’s powerful ability to change how humans think and subjectively experience time has not entirely reconciled Louise to her loss of free will or her daughter’s death. At the same time, Louise’s acknowledgment that meeting the heptapods “changed [her] life” by introducing her to her daughter’s father and thus to her daughter implies that Louise is more grateful than regretful.  

In this passage, Louise implicitly compares herself to the ray of light in Fermat’s Principle of Least Time. Like the ray of light, and like the heptapods, Louise knows her future. Yet, in this passage she once again emphasizes the difference between objective knowledge and subjective experience. Despite knowing exactly what will happen to her, Louise is still not sure whether she is “working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain.” By concluding on a note of uncertainty about the emotional outcome of Louise’s decisions, the story retains the hopeful possibility that Louise might find parenthood more joyful than painful despite her daughter’s unavoidable early death.