Theme - Time - The Night Circus

I found that "time" plays an interesting role in the novel, particularly in the way that it affects the circus performers. Time is most directly symbolized through the clock Herr Thiessen builds for the courtyard. Seemingly at first, it just looks as a beautiful black clock with white face and silver hands, but as it is wound, it begins to take a life of its own. Its face, like puzzle pieces, slowly fall away and morphs from white to grey and finally to black. It's described as something "dreamlike", bring light to the circus theme of creating a "dream world" where visitors walk during the night. All of the circus performers seem to be magically protected from the effects of time, non of them, except for the Murray twins, have aged a day since the circus opened. The only person to actually question the nature of time within the circus is Lainie Burgess, who dies shortly after raising her questions.

In the end, Widget insinuates that the entire novel is an allegory to time. At the end of the novel, Widget begins retelling the story, starting with the first line, again hinting at the cyclic nature of time. There is no sense of time within a dream world, which is likely what Morgenstern is hunting at with the novel's jumbled and fragmented format. The novel jumps around in time, highlighting the way past, present, and future are all intertwined.