This Is How You Lose the Time War

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a major motif of This is How You Lose the Time War, as Red and Blue are acting out their own version of Shakespeare’s famous play throughout the book. Romeo and Juliet are members of feuding families, and their love is shocking and troublesome because neither family wants anything to do with the other. Red and Blue are also members of warring factions who fall in love. In Chapter 20, Blue talks about studying the differences in the worlds where Romeo and Juliet becomes a tragedy and those where it becomes a comedy. In this same chapter, she attends a performance of the play, but she leaves before the end. Her leaving before knowing the ending is symbolic of the fact that she does not know how her own story will end. Like Juliet, Blue dies tragically. Blue dies willingly because of her love for Red and her desire to keep Red safe. She understands that Red will be in danger of being exposed if Blue isn’t killed, so she dies to protect Red. Juliet dies willingly as well because she doesn’t want to live in a world without Romeo and because she feels responsible for his death. Both Juliet and Blue also die by poison at their own hands.

A letter plays a major part in both Red and Blue’s story and in the tale of Romeo and Juliet, but where Red and Blue’s love story diverges from Romeo and Juliet’s story is that the letter was delivered properly. Juliet’s plan would have been successful and she would have lived happily ever after with Romeo (theoretically) if only the letter she had written him to explain it all had been delivered on time. Blue, on the other hand, writes Red a letter as she is dying, and Red retrieves it despite the dangers of doing so. It is the contents of this letter that inspires Red’s plan to save Blue’s life, which is ultimately successful. Red and Blue can now live (relatively) happily ever after because their letters were delivered. Blue, being such a fan of the play and its varied outcome across strands, understood how critical that last letter was, so she made sure her story had a happy ending even if she was in pain while she wrote.

Letters

Letters are a motif throughout the book, as they recur in nearly every chapter to further Red and Blue’s relationship with and understanding of one another. As Red states in Chapter 6, the letters stand in as a physical representation of time travel since the reader experiences the writer’s past in the reader’s present. They can also be reread to experience both the writer’s past and the reader’s past when they read the letter the first time. The absence of letters when Blue dies is replaced by Red’s actual time travel, but the letters themselves operate as markers in time since Red must travel up and down the time stream where she first encountered the letters. Therefore, even when visiting a stream in the future, the letter found there still represents the past. The persistence of letters despite the strand the characters are in shows how words and feelings can carry across time.

Birds

Birds play a heavily symbolic role in the story. Traditionally, birds represent transcendence, freedom, and the delivery of knowledge in literature, and they take on all of these roles throughout the story. In one letter, Blue refers to Red as Cardinal, and Red is represented on the cover of the book as a cardinal to counter Blue's blue jay. Twice Blue delivers a letter to Blue via a goose, and one of these geese is killed by an owl while an owl delivers another letter in pellet form. That owl pellet also contains tiny bones that are part of the components Red needs to build a protective genetic structure of Blue that will allow Red to enter Garden. Overall, the birds are literally delivering knowledge and helping to build the relationship between Blue and Red that will lead to freedom and transcendence for both lovers.

Colors

Colors act as an important motif throughout the novel, particularly red, blue, and green. At first, Red and Blue see their respective colors everywhere in the environment, but as they fall in love with each other, they see each other’s colors everywhere. This shift in the colors they notice symbolizes the broadening of both Red’s and Blue’s perspectives on the world and their understanding that there is room for both of them (and by extension room for the Agency and Garden) in the grand scheme of things. Green in also an important color as it looms over Blue because it reminds her of Garden and represents her fear of being caught and the oppression of her assimilated role within the collective.

Literature & Pop Culture

Literature and pop culture references act as a symbol of the status of the world and a gateway to understanding each character’s perspective. For example, Romeo and Juliet’s genre changes from tragedy to comedy, depending on the strand, which speaks to the fluidity of art and the ways in which strands and their literature can influence each other. The recurring discourse around Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide also symbolizes Red’s rigidity as she tries to communicate her thoughts at first and shows the limitations the Agency has placed upon her.

As a motif, the literary and pop culture references also help ground the reader in the story since the time travel and general world Red and Blue inhabit are completely foreign. For example, while Red’s ability to shut off organs is something beyond a reader’s understanding, recognizing the lines of poetry Blue recites are from “Jabberwocky” (a Lewis Carroll poem), that she’s speaking to the familiar Siri, or that Red calls Blue “Mood Indigo” in reference to a Thelonious Monk song helps the characters become more relatable. By referencing things that are readily identifiable and found in the real world, the reader feels anchored to the story and its protagonists.