Overall: an interesting end, Wells. Some final thoughts.
And so the story ends. The traveler returns to his time, on the night of the dinner party, and re-emerges. I think this is probably the first time we see some direct characterization on his part. The Traveler speaks with a sort of urgency and disconnectedness that imply a potential sort of trouble that the trip has left him with. He produces the flowers that Weena gave him as evidence of his trip, and while the assembled people cannot identify the flowers, they still mostly do not believe his story. As they all leave, the narrator seems a bit changed, though.
Later, the narrator returns to ask some more questions of the Traveler, and finds him similarly erratic. Eventually, while looking away, the Traveler says he needs to attend to something, and uses the time machine to go… well who knows where. The Traveler says that he is in some ways tired of the modern era now that he’s seen other possibilities, and with that he departs. The narrator mentions in the epilogue that it’s been at least three years since the Traveler vanished and there’s been no sign of him nor his machine. The narrator is left to contemplate this, and the fate of the world around him.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, I found this book to be a bit mismatched compared to Frankenstein. At times, it seemed to shift between sci-fi pontification on society and the future, while at others it bore the distinct markings of an adventure story with the set-pieces like the cave, the palace, and the burning forest. Wells’s commentary is very good when he makes it, although certainly more overt than Shelley’s, and skewed more toward a favorable view of Marxism than the more abstract issues that Shelley wrote on. Even so, I think there’s certainly some interesting themes here, especially during the “end of the world” sequence. There’s a hint at posthumanism, and economic/ecological themes peppered throughout the society of the Eloi and the Morlocks, and I kind of wonder how Wells was received in his day, as it seems like this is some pretty subversive stuff (or if not in his own day, I wonder if Wells was put on banned reading lists during the McCarthy years here in the states).
This book also gave me pause to think about genre. Like I briefly noted, the book at times feels more like an “adventure” novel, and I suppose while the lines between that and sci-fi are a bit more fluid, I was also intrigued to note that this isn’t really a time travel story as such. That is to say, the device of “time travel” does not provide the main plot of the narrative, it more acts as a vehicle for the Traveler to explore a new world. In that way, it is more akin to a utopia/dystopia novel, where the protagonist enters a society and sees it from a different lens that is meant to highlight aspects of the author’s world against this imaginary world. The fact that the story is set in the future doesn’t really seem to come into play very often until Wells uses it to think on his culture and where it might be headed. However within the world of the narrative, the land of the Eloi and Morlocks may as well be on Mars. None of this is meant as critique, just some odd final thoughts here and there.
Speaking of Mars, next time I’ll be rounding out the nineteenth century with one more Wells book. Until then, though, any and all thoughts on The Time Machine and HG Wells are welcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment