Reading Group Guide questions from the back of the book #

Would you call The Time Traveler's Wife a comedy or a tragedy, or are such classifications relevant to a work that plays havoc with time and allows one character to appear periodically after his death?

I looked up the exact definition of comedy to make sure I could commit to an answer to this question, and of the ones I found, most said that in a comedy everything thing ends up well for the protagonist, even if it doesn't end up well for every character. Things in The Time Traveler's Wife don't end happily for the protagonists, Clare and Henry. Henry dies, and Clare is therefore sad for the rest of her life. Even though Henry visits her once after his death when Clare is an old woman, that can't change the fact that they have been apart since he was forty three. Alba's life turns out okay, I suppose, she time-travels but she has more control over her condition. She grows up without a father, however, so of courses she isn't in the best place. Based on these thoughts, I decided that The Time Traveler's Wife can't be a comedy. I looked up the definition of tragedy, and it is:

a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction.

The book itself isn't exactly "serious or somber", but it does in fact deal with "serious and somber" themes of loss. Henry would probably be described by some as being "a great person." I would definitely call Henry's time-traveling ability "a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate" and this did lead to his downfall. Therefore, The Time Traveler's Wife is a tragedy.