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Chapter 5
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
Saturday, December 24, 1988 (Henry is 40, Clare is 17). Henry is alone in the Abshire home on Christmas Eve in the basement Reading Room. He knows he should be happy—he is wearing his favorite of the clothing Clare has left for him and has plenty of food—but the date bothers him. He knows at this moment a younger version of him in Chicago is getting drunk enough to need his stomach pumped because he is mourning the 19th anniversary of Annette’s fatal car accident.
Henry continues to struggle to be in the moment. His thoughts about his traumatic past and its lingering effects on his younger self prevent him from enjoying this time he has with Clare.
Themes
Henry considers how what he remembers about his mother, Annette, would be mostly indistinct at this point if he couldn’t time travel. His actual childhood memories are sweet but faded. As an adult, however, time traveling has allowed him to observe his mother out in the world. Seeing her happy in her and Henry’s father’s mundane day-to-day life is both a blessing and a curse. Henry has watched her caring for him in as a child, watched her walking the neighborhood with her father, and watched her performing at the height of her career. He remembers how at peace his father seemed then, too. Clare arrives home then, interrupting Henry’s reveries.
Henry’s time-traveling condition has helped and hindered his grieving process. On the one hand, it allows him to remember his mother more clearly than he would have had he not had so many opportunities to be around her “after” her death. On the other hand, though, Henry’s time traveling forces him to relive the most painful experience of his formative years—and the painful experience of failing to cope with it as a younger person.
Themes
Clare enters the Reading Room and wishes Henry a Merry Christmas. Once her joy settles, she can tell that something is weighing on him. She tries to joke with him, but Henry asks her to join him in the chair so he can tell her about Annette. He tells her about her and Richard’s happy marriage and successful music careers, which allowed them to travel the world. Henry explains that they’d planned a move to Vienna, so his father was in Europe preparing for Henry and his mother’s arrival while they drove to his grandmother’s house for Christmas when he was six.
Henry’s grief over Annette’s death takes him out of the moment makes it harder for him to enjoy the holidays with Clare. But rather than sinking into despair, he uses his grief as an opportunity to grow closer to Clare, sharing with her intimate details of this formative, painful experience from his childhood. It indicates the depth of love they share that he divulges such painful details to her.
Themes
Henry describes the terrible snowstorm they drove through that morning. Henry’s mother didn’t like driving at all, let alone in bad weather, so she had been going slowly in the right lane when a drunk driver slammed into them from behind. This sent their car skidding forward on the icy road, hitting a truck in front of them. A sheet of metal in the truck’s bed was knocked loose; it broke through the windshield and decapitated his mother. Henry only survived because he time traveled at the moment of impact. Ten minutes and 47 seconds later, he returned from his journey through time to the shoulder of the road beside the accident where paramedics found him.
This scene helps to explain why Clare’s earlier erratic driving so upset Henry—it reminded him of the accident that killed his mother. In this regard, then, Henry’s choice to tell Clare about the accident is a responsible choice on his part: he’s giving her an explanation for an extreme emotional response that seemed unreasonable without the proper context. The novel asks readers to suspend their disbelief and accept Henry’s time traveling as something that really exists in the world of the novel. But Henry’s time traveling away from the accident at the moment of impact and then returning once it was over could also function as a metaphor for trauma and grief—his time traveling reflects his inability to confront and accept the true horror of his mother’s death.
Themes
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After Henry finishes his story, Clare asks him how he knows the exact amount of time that passed before his return. He explains that the gravity of the event has continually pulled him back to that day in his time travels; he has returned to the scene often and witnessed it “from every angle.” Henry tells her that during some trips he has even been the one to find himself on the road, to phone the airport to inform Richard, and to wait with his young self in the hospital. Henry begins to cry then admits he has thought that he “should have died, too.” Clare comforts Henry, and he apologies for putting a damper on her Christmas. Clare responds that despite the horror of this information, she is glad to know even a little bit more about him.
Henry’s time traveling continues to function as a metaphor for his grief. That he is consistently pulled toward the day of his mother’s death indicates his simultaneous fixation on and repulsion from this defining formative moment. It’s something that causes him relentless pain, and he won’t be able to begin to heal unless he confronts that pain, which is why something—either the more powerful forces that govern the laws of the universe and Henry’s time traveling, or perhaps his unconscious mind—continuously draws him back to the moment of the wreck.
Themes
