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Time Machine

A group of man, including the narrator, is listening to the time


traveler discuss his theory that time is the fourth dimension.
The time traveler produces a miniature time machine and
makes it disappear into thin air. The next week, the guests
return, to find their host stumble in, looking disheveled and
tired. They sit down after dinner, and the time traveler begins
his story. The time traveler had finally finished work on his time
machine, and it rocketed him into the future. When the machine
stops, in the year 802,701 AD, he finds himself in a paradisiacal
world of small humanoid creature called Elio. They are frail and
peaceful, and give him fruit to eat. He explores the area, but
when he returns he finds that his time machine is gone. He
decides that it has been put inside the pedestal of a nearby
statue. He tries to pry it open but cannot. In the night, he begins
to catch glimpses of strange white ape like creatures the Eloi
call morlocks. He decides that the morlocks live below ground,
down the wells that dot the landscape. Meanwhile, he saves
one of the Eloi from drowing and she befriends him. Her name
is weena. The time traveler finally works up enough courage to
go down into the world of morlocks to try to retrieve his time
machine. He finds that matches are a good defense against the
morlocks. But ultimately they chase him out of their realm.
Frightened by the morlocks, he takes weena to try to find a
place where they will be safe from the Morlocks' nocturnal
hunting. He goes to what he calls the Palace of Green
Porcelain, which turns out to be a museum. There, he finds
more matches, some camphor, and a lever he can use as a
weapon. That night, retreating from the Morlocks through a
giant wood, he accidentally starts a fire. Many Morlocks die in
the fire and the battle that ensues, and Weena is killed. The
exhausted Time Traveller returns to the pedestal to find that it
has already been pried open. He strides in confidently, and just
when the Morlocks think that they have trapped him, he springs
onto the machine and whizzes into the future.
Theme

The Time Machine, written in Britain in 1895, is the product of


an era of great anxiety about social class and economic
inequality. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries had generated incredible wealth in Britain,
but that wealth went almost entirely to the upper classes
instead of being equally distributed to the lower-class workers
whose labor was instrumental to industrial prosperity.
Thus, The Time Machine, though it is primarily set hundreds of
thousands of years in the future, is truly a cautionary tale about
the social conditions of Victorian England. This is most
apparent in the differences between the Eloi and Morlocks, the
two humanlike species of the year 802,701. The Eloi are the
descendants of the British elite, who, through exploitation of the
poor, have created living conditions so easy and idyllic that the
species has actually regressed, losing the intelligence and
strength that characterize present-day humans. Meanwhile the
Morlocks, the descendants of the British working class, have
toiled underground for so long that they’ve lost their ability to
see in the daylight and have resorted to cannibalism. Wells
uses the distinctions between these two species to posit that
the divisions between social classes in Victorian England are
so stark and harmful that they could lead the human species to
split into two different species, each embodying some of the
worst characteristics of humans. The fear and violence that
characterizes the relationship between the Eloi and Morlocks is
also meant to echo the tensions between workers and elites in
Victorian Britain. Wells asks readers to consider that this
relationship, if not reconciled, could evolve into something
much nastier.
The very structure of the narrative of The Time Machine is also
reflective of the theme of inequality. The Time
Traveller recounts his journey into the future to a room full of
social elites (an editor, doctor, journalist, psychologist, etc.),
both because these are his friends and also because they are
the people who have power to effect change in British society,
and the Time Traveller expects his account to be impactful.
While the Time Traveller is a respected scientist, he seems not
quite at home in these circles: the others view him as an
eccentric and he’s uncomfortable with servants (he “hates to
have [them] waiting at dinner”). So the Time Traveller occupies
a complicated class position that, perhaps, makes him uniquely
suited to reflect on the class distinctions he encounters in the
future. It’s also notable that, in Wells’ vision, even the Time
Traveller’s movement hundreds of thousands of years in the
future does not allow him to transcend his class. The Time
Traveller is more at home with the Eloi than the Morlocks, just
as he was socializing with elites in Victorian England.

Conclusion
it is not only future based on inequality between Victorian social
classes, but it is also simply an exaggeration for emphasis of
the social conditions that were class people carry on as they
are, then the human race will evolve into a race of
subterranean dwelling savages. This could be prevented by
equality if everybody is equal then the the time traveller makes
several more steps. In a distant time he stops on a beach there
he is attacked by giant crabs. The bloated red sun sites
motionless in the sky. He then travels thirty million years into
the future the air is very thin, and only sign of life is a black blob
with tentacles. He sees a planet eclipse the sun. He then
returns exhausted to the present time the next day, he leaves
again but never returns.

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