Time Machine (novel series)

Transcription

This is a story about a man who attempts time travel. He proposes the idea to a group of friends at his home, but they dismiss the idea due to a lack of understanding. He asks them to come back to his house a week later for dinner, to which he returns from his first time travel experience. The Time traveller claims that he travelled in a time machine to a Utopian world in the future. In this world, he meets little people called Eloi. They are childlike in both size and intellect, which fascinates him because he would have thought that humans of the future would be smarter and more sophisticated. As he explores this new society, he discovers that his time machine has been dragged into the foot of a statue. Seeing as he can't get to his machine, he continues to explore the community, noting several deep wells throughout the city. He climbs down the well and discovers the Morlocks, a group of ape-like men who live underground and are afraid of fire. He escapes the Morlocks and decides to travel to a green building in the distance for more answers. The green building, he discovers, is an old museum with several exhibits. Most of the exhibits are destroyed, but he finds matches, which happen to scare away the Morlocks. He also realizes that the Morlocks are eating the Eloi. He sets the forest on fire and the Morlocks panic and catch on fire. He eventually gets back into the machine and travels further into the future, seeing the rise of crab people and the end of the Earth. When he finishes telling the story of his travels, the men at his house don't believe him. Despite their lack of imagination, the time traveller goes back into the time machine and vanishes. While this story was not the first to mention the idea of time travel, it has been one of the most influential in the realm of science fiction. The Time Traveller's theories about the future civilization change frequently, which loosely demonstrates the scientific process. He theorizes at first that the future society is Utopian, then Communist, and then revolutionary. The style in which the story is told is important. The story is told in a second-hand account, yet the narrator simply lets the time traveller explain the entire story, making it seem like the story is being told in first-person. More importantly, by allowing the story to be told in second-person from a first-person perspective, this lets the story be told and continued, since if the story was told from the perspective of only the time traveller, how would the time traveller tell the story if he is still travelling time? Does that make sense? In other words, a story about time travel is strongest when told in first-person because of all of the descriptive images we, as the reader, will experience through the character. However, because the time traveller has continued to time travel, if he was the narrator, the audience would not know about his first time travel trip until after he came back from his second trip, or if he came back. Story perspective can be just as confusing as time travel. If you try to trace the sequence of events, it gets messy.