Innocence Vs. Experience In Time Traveller's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger's novel "Time Traveller's Wife" is a story about two protagonists, Henry and Clare. When Henry meets Clare, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before, Clare has known Henry since she was six. Impossible but true, Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past, and future. Henry and Clare's attempt to live normal lives are threatened by a force they can neither prevent, nor control, making their passionate love story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable. In the text, the protagonist' journey from innocence to experience, and the notion of free will vs fate leads them both to struggle with loneliness.
In Time Traveller's Wife, there are many examples that show the theme innocence to experience throughout the novel in both, Henry and Clare’s …show more content…
An example is when Clare asks “Henry, what are you afraid of?” […] “I am afraid of losing you” […] “I worry that you will get tired of putting up with my undependableness and you will leave me” Clare reply’s “I won’t ever leave you, even though you’re always leaving me” […] “Do you ever find that you go back to your present and something has changed? I mean, what if I wrote the date on this drawing right now? What would happen? Henry says “I don’t know. Try It” (Niffenegger 104-105). This example shows the theme Innocence to experience because Henry is afraid of losing Clare and how he is afraid of losing her to his undependable behaviour towards a relationship, that one day he thinks that Clare would leave him. He is still an little kid in a forty-year-old man who never wants to lose his precious toy, even after constantly using it and playing around it from time to time. Henry is innocent to experience a life with Clare that at the same time it scares him