Voyager: A Novel of Purgatory?

Claire. The name knifed across his heart with a pain that was more racking than anything his body had ever been called on to withstand. 

If he had had an actual body anymore, he was sure it would have doubled up in agony. He had known it would be like this, when he sent her back to the stone circle. Spiritual anguish could be taken as a standard condition in Purgatory, and he had expected all along that the pain of separation would be his chief punishment— sufficient, he thought, to atone for anything he’d ever done: murder and betrayal included. (Kindle ed. 4)

Voyager begins with Claire's present--1968--and Jamie's past forming parallels.  Though separated by 200 years, the paradox of time travel allows the events to exist in a kind of simultaneous state of happening.  Jamie lives the past that Claire and Roger try to reconstruct.  So in the early pages of the novel, Jamie believes he has died.  Concluding that he must be in Purgatory, his meandering thoughts hint at a repeated thread:  that his absence from Claire is itself a as a Purgatorial state.

This moment is one that highlighted, but almost did not analyze, until I considered... why the constant references to Purgatory, and Jamie's sins?  How might Voyager be a Purgatorial novel?

In Dante's Commedia, Purgatory is a place of movement.  The closer one gets to heaven, the more movement there is.  To stop moving is to delay the journey toward heaven.   The object is becoming--becoming purified and holy, worth of the rewards of heaven.  In Catholic thought, the earthly journey is the same.  "Voyager" suggests movement. It does not necessarily suggest movement forward, but it could.  There is a subtle difference, I think, between a "voyager" and a "traveler."  Perhaps a traveler has a less finite destination.  Perhaps there are many destinations, with a circuitous route.  A "voyager," by contrast, does not necessarily return to a starting point.  In some ways, as Claire reminisces and and the novel flashes back to Jamie's experiences, the novel outlines the process of becoming for both while deprived of the light of each others' presence (see my hint at the redemptive power of physical/human love).  But though it is preoccupied in the beginning with a replay of the identity-shaping moments that lead up to the "present" (present past?  past present?) the novel makes it clear that there is no going back.  Claire may return to Jamie, but she does not return to a starting point. Moving forward.  Becoming.  

Yet when the novel opens, Jamie is in stasis.  And in fact, his journey without Claire, though a journey of becoming, is marked by long periods of delay--in a cave, in prison, at Helwater, and finally, in Edinburgh.  She is the necessary element of his voyage toward whatever concept of heaven there is in the Outlander series (a heaven that may be characterized by ghostly togetherness, as in the film version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, mentioned in the same post as redemptive human love).  It is not until Claire returns that reconciliations happen (well, sort of) and the journey--a purgatorial journey marked by confession and guilt--continues.