Butterfly Effect part 13:  grandfather paradox

In the past two articles, there has been a certain amount of uncertainty concerning what it was that Evan Treborn intended to do, first with the knife and then with the explosive in the basement that killed Kayleigh.  The assumption was that he was trying to fix the future by undoing the explosion at the mailbox, preventing himself from becoming a quadriplegic and so saving his mother from cancer.  However, there is a possibility that he had something else in mind, but was repeatedly thwarted.  He may have been attempting to commit suicide.

We should give this serious thought.  He has already demonstrated his resolve to do so, attempting to drown himself in the bathtub but being rescued by Tommy.  He proved that he has the willpower to inflict serious pain on himself when he slammed his hands on the spikes to give himself scars.  It might be that what he wanted to destroy was himself, intending to use the knife to end his life at seven, before any of this happened.  It might be, too, that as he lit the fuse on the dynamite he thought that having it in his hand would mean that he would die rather than be crippled.

In the first instance, this solution does not work.  He had time to use the knife but instead walked across the kitchen to where he would be more likely to be seen--to where he might have remembered having been seen.  Had he stayed where he was and stabbed himself, he might have managed to die before his mother could have realized there was a problem.  It is said that when men attempt suicide they are more often successful.  Women still hope to be rescued, and so are less careful; men have made their decision.  Evan was sloppy, if this was his intent.  Besides, he said he needed a way to destroy the blockbuster, which is the explosive.

It is less clear, though, whether we can say the same about the second.  Once he lights the fuse, someone is likely to be hurt.  He is threatening Mr. Miller, but he can't believe that killing Kayleigh's father will fix the future--if she could not forgive him for killing her brother, she will not for killing her father.  If he does not intend to die himself, he needs a way to dispose of the explosive such that no one is hurt.  If he is not planning to die, he is not doing this very well.

If that were Evan's intention, and if he were successful, he would have created a classic grandfather paradox:  he will have undone his existence by killing himself, which has the same effect as killing your own grandfather, creating an infinity loop, but with considerably more certainty.  It is interesting on two levels that he does not succeed.  On one level, it illustrates the belief of fixed time theorists that the universe would prevent you from creating such a paradox.  On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of paradox that Evan has created in other ways several times, undoing the future cause of the past change, and in each case it has followed Niven's Law to prevent paradox.  Why should it be different in this case?  Why should whether Evan kills himself not be covered by Niven's Law, when everything else is?

If Evan did kill himself in the past, that's the end of the story--there will be no Evan Treborn in the future to travel back to fix this.  That's not an entirely implausible ending for a time travel movie, but then for those who have seen Donnie Darko it's a bit of "been there, done that, got the T-shirt".  It's not a new nor even clever idea.  It still might have been the intention; but then, if his goal is to change his mother's life to save her from the cancer she contracted because of the stress of his injuries in an explosion, it is unlikely that his death six years earlier in a different explosion will be less stressful to the woman whose husband is hospitalized for mental illness already.  It's a bad plan if it's the plan, but it's not the plan.  He is trying to eliminate the explosive, not use it.

There is one more matter to consider before we reach the final change.