Time
Time is a recurring theme within 10:04. The title of the book refers to a moment in the film Back to the Future when lighting strikes a clock tower, allowing protagonist Marty McFly to travel through time by utilizing the lightning's energy. Back to the Future is referenced multiple times within the book as the narrator's favorite film; twice within the story, he and Alex watch it together while weathering out storms.
Additionally, the narrator is given an opportunity to reflect upon time while viewing a 24-hour-long video installation entitled The Clock by Christian Marclay. While watching the piece, he "felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction" (53). After this experience, he makes the decisions to write another short story, and begins drafting it in the theatre where The Clock is showing.
Finally, the author spends much of his time in Marfa, Texas contemplating overlapping timelines and the ability of poetry to transcend its time and place. He frequently references a Walt Whitman poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which contains the line “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.“ When viewing artwork at the Chinati Foundation, he is struck by the “geological” nature of Judd’s work, causing the author to experience human and geologic timelines as overlapping.
Reality
In 10:04, reality is another recurring theme, and it is often intertwined with the theme of time. Multiple times throughout the novel, the author feels as though multiple timelines or realities are overlapping and becoming visible to him. During a mundane event—picking up a canister of instant coffee at a grocery store in advance of an oncoming storm—he has a moment of enlightenment. "What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs" (22). After the storm passes, this sensation of enlightenment fades. "Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph" (26).
Later, after working a shift at a grocery co-op, the author walks to a park bench and admires the skyline, feeling his individual personhood dissolve as he does so. In his words, “…discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.” He seems to believe, based on this statement, that even the things that don’t happen are capable of influencing the future because of the past possibility of their occurrence.
Fear
The main tension throughout the story is born from the author’s diagnosis with aortic dilation, a diagnosis which terrifies him. Aortic dilation can cause dissection, a fatal tearing of the aorta. This fear resurfaces throughout the novel via the repeated use of the term “dissection;” multiple times, the author morbidly imagines either himself or the people around him dying suddenly and unexpectedly from dissection.
In addition to the author’s terror surrounding his heart, a more generalized fear of climate change and its effects pervades the novel. Alex and the author weather two “storms of the century” and witness the apocalyptic effects both firsthand and through televised reports. The author imagines his future children demanding to know why they were born when “the world is ending,” and Roberto, his student, relays fears surrounding the rising water levels, Joseph Kony, and the possibility of “water wars.”
Relationships
10:04 addresses the complexity of romantic, sexual, and familial relationships. Noor, a minor character, has a strained relationship with her family after discovering that her father is not really her biological father. Alex grapples with both the pain of her mother’s battle with cancer and her desire to have children as a single mother. The author struggles with his emotions regarding his sexual partner, Alena, and his best friend Alex. Alena’s lack of commitment and emotional distance leave him feeling “gaslighted.” On the other hand, he has strong, unreciprocated feelings for his best friend, Alex, whom he unsuccessfully attempts to seduce twice. After Alex proposes to become co-parents, the author finds himself on completely unstable emotional terrain as he debates whether he wants to become a father with someone who does not have romantic or sexual interest in him.
