Time and Grief

Straub uses time travel as a plot device to further Alice’s emotional development as Alice explores what her father’s death might mean for her. Through time travel, Alice defines what exactly she misses about her childhood and what she will miss about her father. This frees her from the sense of stagnancy she experiences in her day-to-day life.

Through repeatedly returning to her sixteenth birthday, Alice understands what exactly she values about this period in her life: quality time spent with her loved ones. The narrator says, “After one or two birthdays, Alice realized that she was going back mostly for dinner, just to have those hours where she and her dad or she and her dad and Sam sat around a table, talking about nothing in particular but laughing, and happy. Just being together” (209). As an adult, Alice rarely sees Sam...