Magical Realism in Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife

Abstract

This study aims to explore the five elements of magical realism which are portrayed in the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger in order to find out whether the novel can be categorized as magical realism or not. The writer chooses this novel to be analyzed because the novel won the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize and a British Book Award and it has been adapted into a film. The data of this study are characters’ utterances and author narration which contain five elements of magical realism. The data is collected by applying the intensive reading and highlighting the data. This study uses magical realism theory, especially five elements of magical realism proposed by Wendy B. Faris. The results of the study show that The Time Traveler’s Wife contains five elements of Magical Realism. Those are Irreducible Element, Phenomenal World, Unsettling Doubt, Merging Realms, and Disruption of Time. However, the five elements described as the representation of the postcolonial context since magical realism also can be categorized as a way to reveal the authoritative colonialist attitude. Thus, this study found the cultural history of Chicago where the time traveler’s lives as the result of postcolonial side of magical realism.