Answers to Letters Themes

Tomas Tranströmer
This Study Guide consists of approximately 23 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Answers to Letters.

Answers to Letters Themes

Tomas Tranströmer
This Study Guide consists of approximately 23 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Answers to Letters.
This section contains 846 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Answers to Letters Study Guide

Time, Memory, and the Past

Many of Tranströmer's central thematic concerns in "Answers to Letters" are related to time. This is most explicit in the third stanza and its description of the speaker's experience of the labyrinth of time, but each stanza refers to time in some manner, often in connection to the speaker's memory and past represented by the rediscovered letter. Stanza one introduces the theme of an object representing something twenty-six years in the past that is still breathing and panicking; stanza two seems to refer to some obscure and cloudy version of time outside its "fifth window"; stanza four describes time in unique visual terms emphasizing that it does not run in a straight line; and stanza five envisions the speaker in a contradiction between a vague point in time in the future ("one day"), and the specific moment of walking in the wind...

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This section contains 846 words
(approx. 3 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Answers to Letters Study Guide
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Gale
Answers to Letters from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.