Critical Analysis of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

The story in The Time Machine tells of a man who tells of stories of time travel. He travels all throughout history from only about a few hundred years to millions into the future. He talks about seeing different animals and scenery eat time he travels through time and takes a peak in the future world. At one point he gets stuck in a time period in which his machine seems to have left him, so he has to fight for his life against these things only known as Eloi. He eventually finds the machine and goes to a different period and one day he never returns.

This story takes place in a time period in which time travel was a big thing and everyone believed that it could be accomplished because of the invention of motor vehicles and other technologies that were leading up to WWI. People liked to theorize about the new things they would see and would try to come up with new inventions that would be seen in that future. After the war and these inventions becoming more and more advanced, these interests in time traveling grew even more.

Our story takes place in a suburb of London called Richmond. We do not see much of the house in which it's set, just that it contains a feasting room, smoking room, research facility, cultivate, man-servant, maid, and possibly a cook. In this house in Richmond, encompassed by proficient companions and almost invisible hirelings, the Time Traveler appears to some degree protects from the financial and political issues of the time. As the Epilogue tells us, in any case, he is mindful of them, and he's not optimistic around the prospects. See, in Britain, as within the US, the 19th century was full of energizing and unused innovations. Innovation was making a difference and made the industry boom, so everybody was cheerful. Expect for the manufacturing plant laborers, who made almost no money and worked crazy hours at perilous occupations. So the 19th century was not a fair time for industries.

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Within the year 802,701 we are still actually within the London area, but London doesn't exist anymore. The Time Traveler gives us his considerations on the alter; for example, he notes that the Thames River, which is known for being mostly still, has moved over a mile away. The Time Traveler spends a long amount of time walking around the farmland in the future ('the squander garden'), but the two areas that appear most important are the Eloi's communal big house and the Morlocks' communal underground sanctuary. The fact that everybody within the future lives communally sets them apart from the Time Voyager, who is kind of lonely in his little house within the 1890's.

The Time Traveler ends his vacation where we most often start our own, on the beach. But this beach is full of butterfly and crab creatures and is mostly empty, but for a dark rock-like animal with tentacles. These final pictures of the world – as the sun is going out and the soil breaks down and the world stops turning – appear to put the rest of the experience in a different kind of light. Whatever happens to the soil and humanity over the next few hundred thousand years doesn't truly matter, since inevitably there's not going to be anything left.

Wells makes use of the motifs of matchsticks and fire to characterize human technology. The capacity to use the matchsticks is what separates the intellectually higher human beings and the lower animals. However, the irony of technological growth over the millennia has been that its overabundance has led to an excess of complacency in mankind. Technology has satiated all human wishes over the a while and has made struggle, strife and ailment out of date from human life. Rather than having a positive effect on the society of the future, this equal technological know-how has gradually and disastrously rendered one phase of society feeble and devoid of gold standard intellect, whereas it has pressured any other part of society lower back into the subterranean recesses of primitive existence. The feeble Eloi are descendants of a society that lengthy ago forgot the importance of fire, without a doubt due to the fact that technological development rendered it useless. Somewhere alongside the timeline of human existence, society reached a tipping point the place development became into lack of knowledge and society entered a country of mental and bodily regression. Human society became somehow, much less human. Similarly, the Morlocks have been pressured underground due to the deep social divisions that the possession of technological know-how created between the so-called privileged lessons and the laborers. The tables have now been turned, however, as the oppressors have become the oppressed. The time traveler is seen as the usage of suits to impress the infantile Eloi on one occasion and to combat the Morlocks on the other. Matchsticks and furnace for that reason symbolize the ironic regression and division of a society that was once in fact supposed to make progress in its evolution.

The very structure of the narrative of The Time Machine is also reflective of the theme of inequality. The Time Traveler recounts his trip into the future to a room full of social elites (an editor, doctor, journalist, psychologist, etc.), each due to the fact these are his friends and additionally because they are the people who have strength to impact exchange in British society, and the Time Traveler expects his account to be impactful. While the Time Traveler is a respected scientist, he appears no longer quite at domestic in these circles: the others view him as an eccentric and he’s uncomfortable with servants. So the Time Traveler occupies a complex type function that, perhaps, makes him uniquely desirable to reflect on the class distinctions he encounters in the future. It’s also awesome that, in Wells’ vision, even the Time Traveler’s motion heaps of lots of years in the future does no longer allow him to transcend his class. The Time Traveler is greater at home with the Eloi than the Morlocks, just as he used to be socializing with elites in Victorian England. The science fiction world of 802,701 then, is a dystopian projection into the future based on inequality between Victorian social classes, but it is additionally definitely an exaggeration for emphasis of the social prerequisites that have been current with Wells’ writing.