Essay Questions

What prestigious award has Mrs. Murry earned?

Mrs. Murry has won a Nobel Prize, although the specific category in which she earned the honor is not explicitly identified. Hints are available from a conversation about the actual research, however. Apparently, the research with which Mrs. Murry engaged would eventually send her to Sweden has to do with isolating farandolae within a mitochondrion. These terms would seem to indicate her Nobel Prize was either for chemistry or medicine. The result of that discovery, however, is the awareness of a symbiotic relationship between farandolae and mitochondrion with the conclusion that anything which impacts the former will have an impact on the latter. Since mitochondria are charged with providing energy, a negative impact on farandolae could ultimately result in an explosive chain reaction. That terminology more strongly suggests that her Prize was awarded in the category of physics.

Why doesn’t Charles simply go back to the right time and right place to fix the error of the present?

The difficulty of everything connected with Charles’ task comes down to the one uncool thing about unicorns, at least as they exist here. The unicorn is a time traveling conveyance that can move through time with no problem. The problem is moving through space simultaneously. Going back in time to fix the problem in the past so that the error of the future can be corrected turns out to be a much more complicated process requiring a great deal of trial and error that requires using the unicorn as the means of traveling back to multiple versions of When that all happen to be located in the very same Where. It is only though this trial-and-error process that Charles can finally arrive at the precise When-and-Where required to fix things. Although this may seem needlessly complicated and easily fixed by outfitting Charles with a machine capable of traveling through both time and space, it is one of the standard tropes of time travel fiction that the machine is capable only of hurling one through time to the exact same space where the journey originated.

What strange perceptual phenomenon does the final scene of the book suggest?

The final scene takes place after the errors of the present have finally been corrected in the past. This means that the version of the past that was presented in the opening scenes of the book never happened, and thus all those old memories have subsequently been replaced by different memories. Despite this, however, Mr. and Mrs. Murry seem to retain, just barely, some semblance of consciousness of that previously existing timeline when a letter seems to them to somehow be different from what they read before. This particular moment recalls a perceptual hiccup most people have experienced at least once or twice in their lives known as jamais vu. Déjà vu is the term for that weird experience where you briefly feel as though you have experienced exactly the same situation before. Jamais vu, on the other hand is the strange feeling in which an experience one is familiar with becomes strangely unfamiliar in a way that is more easily sensed than explained. What Mrs. Murry dismisses as a “queer trick” played by memory is obviously not true in her case but comes with the implicit suggestion that perhaps jamais vu is the result of someone traveling back in time.