The+Time+Traveller


 * Synopsis: __The Time Machine__**

__The Time Machine__ by H. G. Wells tells the story of the “the Time Traveller”, an unnamed inventor and scientist. After building a time machine and using it to travel far into the future, he recounts his story to a group of friends at a dinner party.

The story begins in the Time Traveller’s residence, a large house in Victorian England. The Time Traveller reveals to some friends that he has built a time machine and intends to use it. His friends remain skeptical.

A week later, the Time Traveller again hosts dinner with his friends. This time, however, he bursts into the room and demands attention, claiming that he has just returned from an excursion to the far future. With this basic frame set up, the Time Traveller begins his narration.

The Time Machine first took the traveller to the year 802701. He is soon approached by slender, frail creatures dressed in robes. The creatures are confident and try to speak to him in a foreign language. When the Time Traveller tries to explain to them that he is from the past, they misunderstand him and think he is claiming to be a god from the sky. Dismayed by their stupidity, the Time Traveller is disappointed and reveals that he had expected the future to be dominated by intelligence and enlightenment.

After spending the day with the creatures (which he calls Eloi), the Time Traveller returns to his machine but finds that it is missing. He is scared and sleeps in the hall with the Eloi. In the morning, he begins searching for the machine.

During the next few days, the Time Traveller learns a lot about the futuristic world. The Eloi are only one of two societal classes. The other, the Morlocks, are white and ape-like. They live underground but come out at night, when they hunt and eat the Eloi.

While searching for his machine, the Time Traveller ventures underground. However, he is attacked by the Morlocks, who are not peaceful like the Eloi. He narrowly escapes by using a match to deter the sensitive Morlocks. Eventually, he discovers that his machine has been stored by the Morlocks underneath a statue. Hoping to ambush him, the Morlocks attack when he enters the area. Again, he narrowly escapes by using the machine to travel further into the future.

Now, orbital decay has resulted in the tidal locking of Earth’s orbit, so the sun remains stationary in the sky. The sun is huge and the atmosphere is thin. Large crab-like creatures approach him, so he continues into the future. Now, after about 30 million years, the sun is obscured by another planet and the Earth environment is cold and mostly lifeless. The Time Traveller is disturbed, and the only sign of life he sees is an ominous black tentacle. The Time Traveller then resets his machine to return back to the present, and he arrives back at his house just before he began to tell the story to his guests.

The Time Traveller’s story explores the ideas of communism, capitalism, and social Darwinism, which were popular when H. G. Wells wrote the novel. The stark division between the Eloi and the Morlocks is supposedly the result of capitalism. Morlocks, the descendants of the working class, have been economically and socially deprived at the expensive of the dominant Eloi, who live in a utopian communist society without requirements of work or labor.

According to the theory of social Darwinism, which emerged in the late 1800s, sociological and political competition between humans would lead to progress in the same way that biological competition led to speciation via natural selection. This idea was used to promote cutthroat capitalism and policies ensuring the survival of the fittest rather than welfare programs or labor laws.

The Eloi and Morlocks that the Time Traveller find are supposedly the result of this system, which in the novel was largely unsuccessful. The Eloi are unintelligent, superstitious, and lazy, and they live simple lives. The Morlocks, however, toil underground and must hunt for food. Because of the great social imbalance, society is unproductive and devoid of science and innovation.


 * Archetype**

The Time Traveller exhibits many of the traits of an epic hero. Although the novel is certainly not an epic poem, its storyline and plot structure shares many similarities with classic epics like __The Odyssey__. The Time Traveller possesses outstanding power and unusual abilities with his time machine. The machine is a tremendous feat of science and technology not unlike the magical weapons of Beowulf or Odysseus. With his time machine, the Time Traveller can move himself to any place in time at the touch of a button. This ability features as an important element of the plot in many situations. For example, the Time Traveller uses his ability to instantaneously travel in order to escape from the Morlocks and the crab creatures. Also, when he loses the time machine, he is obligated to find it.

The Time Traveller is brave, adventurous, and courageous. These character traits are perfectly consistent with the epic hero. With few safety precautions and little preparation, he throws himself into an unknown, and possibly dangerous, world. When he arrives, he is outgoing as he associates with the creatures. He is willing to fight the Morlocks. Throughout the story, his unpreparedness is remarkable: he brings no weapons and has no plan, coming up with everything as he goes. This daring boldness is very similar to the behavior of epic heroes like Beowulf, who also throws himself into dangerous situations like the fight with Grendel. Further, the Time Traveller is genuinely adventurous. He tells that his actions were carried out “with a strange sense of freedom and adventure” (31). This attitude during a time of hardship and danger characterizes the Time Traveller as an epic hero.

The Time Traveller’s descent into the realm of the Morlocks is parallel to the archetypal descent into the Underworld. The Time Traveller describes the underground world, saying “big machines rose out of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral Morlocks sheltered from the glare” (56). This unpleasant but imperative challenge is similar to Beowulf’s descent into the lake to kill Grendel’s mother or Odysseus’s visit to Hades.

The structure of the story is similar to that of an epic. The Time Traveller has a distinct quest—to find and retrieve his time machine from the Morlocks—and he faces a serious of challenges that require strength of body and mind to overcome.

Finally, the Time Traveller dies a noble death. A week after he tells his story to his friends at the dinner gathering, he goes on another excursion, promising to one of his friends (the real narrator) that he will return soon. However, the narrator reveals that 3 years have passed and the Time Traveller has not been back, presumably having become lost in time or suffered some unpleasant death in the future. The Time Traveller dies in action, much like Beowulf dies in combat with a dragon.


 * How to Speak Like the Time Traveller**

__1. Become excited about what you are saying.__ As he tells his story, the Time Traveller will get excited about certain things. For example, at the beginning when he is describing non-Euclidean geometry (a topic which he obviously enjoys), “his grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated” (3). The Time Traveller shows some of the traits of a mad scientist with his enthusiasm for what he says.

__2. Be sharp and impatient in speech and behavior.__ The Time Traveller is not very patient with his listeners. He bluntly says such things as “you must refrain from interruptions. Is it agreed?” (17). His overbearing and slightly arrogant attitude enhances the importance of the tale he is telling.

__3.__ __Use sophisticated diction and sentence structure.__ The Time Traveller speaks with an advanced vocabulary, and even when telling exciting stories, his speech usually remains careful and refined. When recounting his exciting fight with the Morlocks, he says, “The matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box. You may imagine how all my calm vanished” (82). To speak like the Time Traveller, do not resort to short, exclamatory sentences but speak professionally.

__4.__ __Proclaim honesty.__ The Time Traveller frequently tries to improve the credibility of his story by asserting that it is true. He frequently adds statements like “it’s true—every word of it” and “the story I told you was true” to his narration (17, 91). The Time Traveller may feel obligated to include these statements because his story is so fantastic. However, they are still a fairly distinctive part of his speech.

__5. Describe both physical events and your personal feelings and emotions.__ The Time Traveller is not a detached storyteller. His story includes his opinions, thoughts, and emotions. The progression of his thoughts is sometimes as important as the progression of events. For example, when describing his initial encounter with the Eloi, the Time Traveller says “a flow of disappointment rushed across the mind” along with a description of his personal expectations of the future (26). He also describes the development of his theory on the nature of the future society in great detail. Events that occur in the story are often followed by exposition of what was going on in the Time Traveller’s mind at the time. His emphasis on his thoughts reveals that he places importance on the intellectual conclusions to be made in addition to the actual events witnessed.

Almost all of the Time Traveller’s speech in the novel is during the narration of his tale. These steps would presumably be appropriate when telling a story to an audience. Steps #1 and #3 might make the story more interesting for listeners, and the others would be especially useful in a first-person story. However, the Time Traveller’s speech is probably not very appropriate for something like a lecture or didactic speech. He includes many digressions into his personal subjectivities, which would be interesting in a story.


 * Future events**

It is interesting to speculate how the Time Traveller met his end. He never returns from one of his travels. At the beginning of the story, the Time Traveller claims to have resolved the grandfather paradox (what would happen if you go back in time and kill your grandfather?). Perhaps this confidence was misguided and his last travel was into the past, where he somehow disturbed his presence in the future. However, this ending is unlikely; the Time Traveller shows very little interest in the past, seeming to only focus on the future.

His previous travel to the end of the Earth reveals that the location of his laboratory is always on solid ground, so the Time Traveller could not have died in a mishap during transportation. However, he could have met his demise in a dangerous encounter elsewhere.

Or, the Time Traveller may have chosen to stay wherever he ended up. If his machine was lost or stolen, he wouldn’t have had a choice. However, if he found a satisfactory society at some other time in the future, he may have decided that it would be nicer to stay than to return. For example, he would have probably managed a fairly successful life 30 years in the future, where he could enjoy the technological and scientific advances without radical social changes. Although he is quite disgusted by the society in 802701 and probably did not return there, he may have found some other society at some other time in the future that was accommodating or attractive in some way. To voluntarily not return and start a new life may seem quite extreme. However, the Time Traveller does not seem to have a close family nor close friendships, so maybe his motivation to return was not so strong.

This YouTube video from a 1960 film adaptation shows a creative version of the Time Traveller’s actual transport through time: []

This video shows some of the more significant excerpts from the same movie: []