Background: I recently finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, and had a thesis to share about the book. (⚠️ heavy spoilers ahead), only proceed if you’ve already read it, or plan to stop midway.

AI usage: Every character has been manually typed, except exact quotes from the book. No autocomplete or AI generation used. Thesis and ideas are all mine, but AI helped me find relevant quotes from the book after I finished reading it.

I really enjoyed the book and highly recommend it, with the disclaimer that it gets pretty disturbing at times and should be accompanied with lots of trigger warnings on violence and consent. I enjoyed the journal format and plan to use it for a long due time travel story of mine. It helped that I identify as a member of the “nothing changes” camp among time travel sci-fi fans.

“… there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did …”

Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if there were subliminal messages in the novel? Not that it needs to, since I feel it was a well-imagined narrative of what happens if a guy has this condition. It was pointed out to me that one way to read into the novel could be about toxic relationships - since Henry and Claire are a very problematic couple, and have trouble with boundaries, consent, and maintaining a life outside of the relationship.

I was already pulling on this thread of how the book could be about something more than time travel, when I came across this terrifying scene:

“Ingrid’s dead,” Henry says. I put my arms around him. “Ingrid’s been dead for a long time,” I say softly. Henry shakes his head. “Years, minutes…same thing,”

Henry has just time traveled from years ago where he saw Ingrid die in front of him. He has known about her death, the exact date and cause, for a very long time. And yet, he is found one day in his home, weeping over this bygone tragedy.

Did he really time travel or merely get lost in the trauma of an ex-lover’s death, for which he holds himself responsible? What if the entire book can be read without any superpowers of time travel? Could Henry be just a troubled person, often lost in worries about the past and the future?

“I time travel. Involuntarily.”

In psychology, there’s a real condition called chronesthesia or mental time travel where a person can tune out and metaphorically time travel to past memories or future imaginations. The more I thought about this theme, the more I saw it everywhere in the book.

Henry very often time travels to the terrible accident from his childhood where his mother is killed in a car crash. Revisiting the trauma-triggering incident is a common symptom of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).

“My mother dying…it’s the pivotal thing…everything else goes around and around it… I dream about it, and I also—time travel to it. Over and over.

Other incidents of time travel are to talk with himself, which is perhaps the most relatable version of time travel to anyone who has ever written a journal.

… my friend, guide, brother was me. Me, only me.

He also visits his wife from the past, reliving happy memories. And sometimes, he travels to the future, trying to see what’s in store for him, or to look for his daughter. In my reading then, these are instances of Henry dwelling about past memories, happy or sad, and worrying about his and his family’s future.

But overthinking need not always be bad - the most intelligent investors spend a large amount of time imagining the future, and reaping the benefits of seeing it before everyone else. This explains how Henry earns most of his money.

In 2000 the stock market is insane, but there are amazing fortunes to be made, and Gomez will be one of the lucky ones. “Ever heard of the Internet?” “No.” “It’s a computer thing. A vast, worldwide network with regular people all plugged in, communicating by phone lines with computers. You want to buy technology stocks. Netscape, America Online, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Amazon.com.” He’s taking notes.

Most of Henry’s “time travel” is preceded by Henry being really worked up, in an apparent hat tip to the theory that it is indeed an advanced form of worrying.