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Chapter 20
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
Friday, December 31, 1999, 11:55pm (Henry is 36, Clare is 28). It is New Year’s Eve, and Clare and Henry are attending a rooftop party. Everyone talks excitedly and a bit nervously about the nearing turn of the millennium. Henry, having been to the future, knows that their fears are unfounded. While they wait for the firework show to start, Clare waves to the rest of the city. Henry considers all the things that he knows will come to pass and the way the city will change in the upcoming decades. For this moment, however, he feels as though “time stands still,” and he is overcome with hope that things will get better.
Henry’s foreknowledge once more prevents him from being in the here and now and experiencing things as others experience them. Though it’s a comfort to know that there’s nothing to fear about the approach of the new millennium (the book is referring to Y2K problem—at the time, many people worried that the year 2000, which in computer programs that represent years with only the last two digits, would be indistinguishable from the year 1900 and so would cause computer programs to crash), Henry’s foreknowledge prevents him from having the same experience of anxiety that the other partygoers are having.
Themes
