Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
What Time is It?
So it's pretty apparent that Claire has traveled two hundred years back in time. This isn't one of those books where time travel is actually a dream the main character wakes up from in the end. But even though we know time travel has happened, we never quite understand why.
We're also not sure just how often this happens to other people. Claire meets one other time traveler in the book, Geillis Duncan, but she wonders how many other women have been unstuck in time like a character in a Kurt Vonnegut story.
The mystery deepens as Claire listens to the legends told by the bard of Castle Leoch. One in particular concerns a woman who "was tired, as though she had traveled far, but could not tell where she had been, nor how she had come there" (8.66). Sound familiar? The point behind time travel, then, is at least partially that Claire is not alone in doing it—unusual, yes, but alone, not so much.
Time travel is a reference, then, to a shared position, even if we don't know a whole lot about this yet (remember, we're just getting started in this book—there are a whole lot of pages that come in future books).
Also, if time traveling is true, how many other legends are also rooted in reality? We're thinking this is an important question to plant as this whole saga begins in Outlander, and it certainly establishea that not only have we gone back in time, but there are also other ways in which the world we're hanging out in likely doesn't resemble the one we live in.