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Part 6, Chapter 20
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory and Meaning
Love and Vulnerability
Freedom
Art, Creativity, and Expression
Wonder and Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
New York City. September 5, 2014. Henry wakes up. It’s sunny outside and he feels hungover. Book stares at him from the foot of the bed. He rolls over to wake Addie, but she’s not there. Then Henry remembers last night. And then he remembers the journals. He runs to the narrow shelves where he stored them. Henry opens the journals, and Addie’s story spills out, “shielded from the curse by the fact the words themselves are his, though the story is hers.” Henry sits with the journals for hours, reliving every story Addie ever told him. Addie’s gone, but Henry isn’t, and “[h]e remembers everything.”
Henry’s writings about Addie haven’t disappeared because ideas (in this case, “words”) are stronger than memories. The survival of Henry’s writings reaffirms the novel’s central thesis that art, creativity, and expression are instrumental in shaping reality and giving meaning to experience. Henry’s journals aren’t a documentation of Addie’s life but of the way her life and the connection she and Henry shared have touched and inspired him. This connection, the novel suggests, is far more meaningful than the mere existence of Addie’s or Henry’s lives on their own.
Themes
