Time Machine: H.G.Wells

The novel begins with the narrator attending a dinner party with well-educated, upper-class professionals and experts, including his buddy, an acclaimed scientist whom he refers to as the Time Traveller. The Time Traveller is explaining scientific and mathematical ideas to his guests, including the idea that time (or “duration”) is a traversable dimension like length or breadth. This leads to a discussion of how time travel may be conceivable. The gathering visitors react with suspicion and enthusiasm, eventually demanding that the Time Traveller demonstrate to them that he has constructed a system for time travel.

Theme of the Time Machine

The Time Traveller is discussing his hypothesis that time is the fourth dimension with a group of guys, including the narrator. The Time Traveller creates a small time machine and vanishes into thin air. The visitors return the next week to find their host stumbling in, untidy and fatigued. After supper, everyone sit down, and the Time Traveller begins his narrative.

The Time Traveller had finally completed his time machine, which launched him into the future. When the machine malfunctions in the year 802,701 AD, he awakens in a paradisiacal planet of miniature humanoid creatures known as Eloi. They are fragile and calm, and they feed him fruit. He investigates the region, but when he returns, he discovers that his time machine has vanished. He concludes that it was placed within the pedestal of a neighbouring statue. He tries but fails to pry it open. During the night, he begins to get glimpses of odd white ape-like creatures known as Morlocks by the Eloi. He comes to the conclusion that the Morlocks reside underground, in the wells that dot the terrain. Meanwhile, he saves Eloi from drowning, and she becomes his companion. Weena is her name. The Time Traveller eventually musters the bravery to enter Morlock territory in order to rescue his time machine. He discovers that matches are an effective defence against the Morlocks, but they eventually chase him out of their domain. Fearful of the Morlocks, he takes Weena to try to establish a safe haven from the Morlocks’ nightly hunts. He visits the Palace of Green Porcelain, which turns out to be a museum. He discovers additional matches, camphor, and a lever he can use as a weapon there. That night, while fleeing the Morlocks through a massive wood, he accidentally sets a fire. Many Morlocks perish in the fire and the ensuing combat, and Weena is slain. The worn out Time Traveller returns to the pedestal, it has already been wrenched apart. He walks in boldly, and just as the Morlocks believe they’ve caught him, he leaps aboard the machine and whizzes into the future.

The Time Traveller continues on his journey. He comes to a halt on a beach in the distant past and is assaulted by huge crabs. In the sky, the bloated crimson sun is immobile. He then takes a journey thirty million years into the future. The sole evidence of life is a black blob with tentacles, and the air is extremely thin. He witnesses a planet’s eclipse of the sun. He then returns to the present, tired. He departs again the next day, but never returns.

The Time Machine by H G Wells Analysis

The Time Machine is divided into two sections. The first is an adventure story set in the year 802,701 AD about the Eloi and Morlocks. The second is science fiction’s time machine.

Many archetypal aspects are present in the adventure narrative. The Time Traveller’s voyage to the underworld, his terror of the Great Forest, and his love with Weena all reflect imagery common in older literature, imagery closely connected with the inner workings of the human psyche.

The story of 802,701 is a political parable set in late Victorian England. It’s a dystopia, a dystopian image of the future. It advises modern civilization to modify its ways or risk becoming like the Eloi, scared of a subterranean race of Morlocks. Wells satirises Victorian excess in the Eloi. Wells offers a possibly Marxist criticism of capitalism in The Morlocks.

The remainder of the novella is devoted to the science fiction of time travel. Others had written time travel fantasies before Wells, but he was the first to inject the genre with a heavy dose of scientific conjecture. Wells’ Time Traveller speaks at length on the fourth dimension, as well as the bizarre astronomy and evolutionary tendencies he witnesses as he travels through time. Much of this was influenced by Wells’s tutor, Thomas Henry Huxley, and his thoughts on entropy and decay.

Message of the Time Machine

Wells is attempting to depict a damaged, wrecked image of the future planet. He’s attempting to convey how dreadful the world may become if mankind continues on its current path. In this dreadful desolate flawed vision, Wells is attempting to depict the world’s doom. The time traveller journeys further deeper into the future to avoid the morlocks. The world is progressively deteriorating, and the planets have collected much closer to the sun; the world appears to be wrecked and devastated.’ As the night deepened, the eddying flakes became more numerous, dancing before my eyes, and the air became colder. Finally, one by one, the far hills’ white summits dissolved into blackness; the planet is being destroyed before the time traveller’s eyes, and he is telling his visitors how it will be destroyed finally. Humanity and all signs of life appear to have vanished. The time traveller notes how peaceful the earth appears to be and detects no indications of life. The world remained silent beyond these dead noises. Silent? The calm of it all would be difficult to explain. All of the noises of man, the bleating sheep, the screams of birds, the hum of insects, the commotion that forms the background of our life, it was all gone.’ Human life, as well as all other kinds of life, had been extinguished. ‘The Time Machine’ is a message to society, not merely a spectacular science fiction novel; it has a significant message. A class system exists now, and it is already producing significant distinctions between various classes, according to Wells. If society is dominated by a class system, mankind would divide and eventually destroy itself, as in the time machine. This book’s theme is that “the current class structure should be destroyed before mankind ends up destroying itself and the planet around it.”

Conclusion

It’s pretty vague. The Time Traveller goes away and never returns. We have no idea where or why he went. The unnamed narrator makes some guesses to show the range of possibilities: maybe he’s with our primitive ancestors or dinosaurs (but not at the same time), or maybe he’s in the near future.