43 pages • 1 hour read
Audrey NiffeneggerThe Time Traveler's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 39-43Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “A Drop in a Bowl of Milk”
Part 2, Chapter 39 Summary: “Fragments”
Beginning from Clare’s point of view, a series of snippets is described throughout the chapter. Henry crashes into his home, freezing. Clare rushes him to the ER. Henry is treated over the course of three days for hypothermia and frostbite and eventually loses his feet. About three weeks later, Henry returns home miserable and in a wheelchair. He becomes increasingly despondent until Kimy comes over and motivates him to take a bath. Clare takes to designing, creating an angel sculpture of Henry. As the chapter concludes, Clare brings Henry into her studio and reveals the sculpture.
Part 2, Chapter 40 Summary: “Feet Dreams”
Henry narrates some of his vivid dreams, of which his missing feet are the primary subject.
In the second part of the chapter, Clare discusses how Henry is teaching her how to cook.
Part 2, Chapter 41 Summary: “What Goes Around Comes Around”
The chapter begins in the present, December of 2006, before moving to 1994. Henry travels to visit Ingrid and does not have feet. When Ingrid sees him, she is not sympathetic, though she does offer him painkillers from her private stash of drugs. Henry and Ingrid talk, and it is clear that she holds much animosity toward him. The conversation takes a dark turn when Ingrid pulls out a gun. At first, she points it at Henry and taunts him before turning it on herself and committing suicide. Henry returns to the present. He informs Clare where he has been and what he has seen.
Part 2, Chapter 42 Summary: “Hours, if not Days”
It is once again Christmas Day, this time 2006. Henry is 43. As is always the case, Henry remembers his mother and her death on Christmas Day, now 37 years past. Alba wakes up in the night and Henry crawls his way into her room.
Part 2, Chapter 43 Summary: “New Year’s Eve, Two”
It is New Year’s Eve and Clare has organized a party to celebrate. All of her and Henry’s friends have been invited, as have Richard, Kimy, and Clare’s father, brother, and sister. Much of the evening involves various discussions between Henry, Clare and those who attend the party. As the New Year’s countdown begins, Clare and Henry are alone on the porch. Henry tells Clare that the time of his death has arrived. The chapter ends just as the clocks strike midnight.
Chapters 39-43 Analysis
This section builds toward Henry’s death. The Chapter “Fragments” describes Henry’s hypothermia and amputations in snippets, rather than in cohesive detail. In this way, the writing mimics the jarring nature of trauma.
Henry knows that his death is coming. At the same time, he struggles with losing his feet. He can’t live recklessly in the moment the way his younger self could have. Instead, his final days are an exercise in coming to peace with death.
Because of his mother’s death, Henry understands the impact loss can have on the survivors. On Christmas, Henry says: “Today is the thirty-seventh anniversary of my mother’s death. I have thought of her, I have longed for her every day of those thirty-seven years” (499). The key word here is “longing.” Henry knows that when he dies, Clare will also long. While he accepts his fate, he struggles with the impact it will have on Clare. He says: “She’ll be ok without me, I think as I watch her, but I know that she will not” (500).
It’s not that Clare lacks the courage to proceed with life. It’s just that his own experiences have taught him how the death of a loved one changes you irrevocably. His letter to Clare, which we will learn about in Part 3, is a last attempt at fending off her longing.
Henry dies by accident on one of his trips to the past. As his life plays out, the linear course of his life moves toward the moment that already happened. Henry realizes that nothing can be done to change it. He has already died. Clare, as she has done before, foils Henry. She refuses to accept that his death cannot be changed. She implores Henry to reverse course: “Stop it. Refuse to let it happen. Change it” (511). She believes that because Henry is able to time travel, he is somehow able to impose his will triumphantly over fate. She narrates: “It’s impossible to believe that Henry, so solid, my lover, this real body, which I am holding pressed to mine with all my strength, could ever disappear” (512). Her denial of her miscarriages echoes now, with Henry’s impending death.
