Niffenegger identifies the themes of the novel as "mutants, love, death, amputation, sex, and time". Reviewers have focused on love, loss, and time. As Charlie Lee-Potter writes in The Independent , the novel is "an elegy to love and loss". The love between Henry and Clare is expressed in a variety of ways, including through an analysis and history of the couple's sex life.
While much of the novel shows Henry and Clare falling in love, the end is darker and "time travel becomes a means for representing arbitrariness, transience, [and] plain bad luck", according to The Boston Globe 's Judith Maas. As Andrew Billen argues in The Times , "The book may even serve as a feminist analysis of marriage as a partnership in which only the male is conceded the privilege of absence." Several reviewers noted that time travel represents relationships in which couples cannot quite communicate with each other. Natasha Walter of The Guardian describes the story's attention to "the sense of slippage that you get in any relationship—that you could be living through a slightly different love story from the one your partner is experiencing." She points, for example, to the section of the book which describes the first time Clare and Henry make love. She is 18 and he is 41, already married to her in his present. After this interlude, he returns to his own time and his own Clare, who says,
Henry's been gone for almost twenty-four hours now, and as usual I'm torn between thinking obsessively about when and where he might be and being pissed at him for not being here ... I hear Henry whistling as he comes up the path through the garden, into the studio. He stomps the snow off his boots and shrugs off his coat. He's looking marvelous, really happy. My heart is racing and I take a wild guess: "May 24, 1989?" " Yes , oh, yes!" Henry scoops me up ... and swings me around. Now I'm laughing, we're both laughing.
The novel raises questions about determinism and free will. For example, critic Dan Falk asks, "Given that [Henry's] journey has 'already happened,' should he not simply be compelled to act precisely as he remembers seeing himself act? (Or perhaps he is compelled, and merely feels he has a choice...?)." Although Henry seemingly cannot alter the future, the characters do not become "cynical" and, according to Lee-Potter, the novel demonstrates that people can be changed through love. Walter notes that there is a "quasi-religious sense" to the inevitability of Henry's and Clare's lives and deaths. Niffenegger, however, believes that the novel does not depict destiny but rather "randomness and meaninglessness".
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