51 pages • 1 hour read
Emma StraubThis Time Tomorrow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Pomander Walk
Pomander Walk is both a setting and a symbol in This Time Tomorrow. The setting is indicative of Leonard and Alice’s long-standing love for one another, the space for their companionship, and decades of happy memories. Pomander Walk represents what Alice loves about New York City; while the city’s trends and cultures may change, Pomander Walk remains the same. Their home is a place of comfort, where Leonard and Alice can return to relive their happiest memories. The fact that it is also a portal for time travel, allowing them to reunite over and over again in different contexts, is a testament to the permanence of love, cementing their companionship and love for one another throughout time.
Books
Books play an important symbolic role in the novel. Leonard’s identity as a best-selling author informs how he lives his life and raises his daughter. His integrity as an author is such that he doesn’t publish just for money or acclaim; he truly believes in the joys of his writing and feels a responsibility to his readers. His first novel, about time travel, provides an important blueprint for what Alice experiences. His second novel, inspired by Alice’s experience traveling through time, provides a sign to her future self that she has had a positive impact on his life and work. It also symbolizes his faith and belief in her. Just as books connect Leonard and Alice through time, Straub’s novel is a testament to her own father, also an author. Thus, Straub positions herself as Alice, looking up to her father’s work as indicative of both his creativity and his belief in the liminal expressions of the human condition.
Time Travel
In this novel, time travel is a motif that expresses the diversity of human experience available to those who believe in the possibilities of the unknown. Time travel is a reliably popular trope of science fiction; there is an innate interest in time travel because of the human hyperawareness of mortality. With only one life to live, human beings often wonder what could have happened differently in their lives. This is an issue of existentialism, in which humans search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. Time travel allows for trying on different lives and experiencing different selves. Humans have a long memory, enabling nihilistic reflection on their pasts—typically leading to the conclusion that wondering about past decisions and the turning points of a life is futile. But with time travel, this futility is erased and human consciousness expands. Through time travel, Alice learns the importance of moving forward. Time travel is thus a metaphor for the ways in which people worry about the paths they’ve taken, questioning the authenticity of their lives.
