In 'The Time Machine' how is the reader led towards the truth about the Morlocks? What is the significance of the Morlocks in this novel?

Authors Avatar

GCSE PRE 1914 PROSE STUDY COURSEWORK

In ‘The Time Machine’ how is the reader led towards the truth about the Morlocks? What is the significance of the Morlocks in this novel?

The Time Machine written by H. G. Wells in 1895 is considered to be one of the first science fiction novels ever written.

The novel begins with a small dinner party at the time traveller’s home. The time traveller has no name, or a least we are given none in this novel. This produces a dark and mysterious image of the time traveller which I think H. G. Wells is trying to get across to his readers. The subject gets around to time travel and the time traveller gets an object out ‘scarcely larger that a small clock’. He tells his dinner guests that the ‘very delicately made’ object was a prototype of a time machine and places it ‘on the heartrug’. The dinner guests get baffled and object to the whole idea of time travel. The time traveller explains that its two levers move the traveller forward or backward in time. Now with the aid of the Psychologist, so that ‘there is no trickery’ the time traveller sends the model of the time machine through time. The machine disappears and the guests are shocked. The dinner guests ask if it is gone into the past or the future, the time traveller admits ‘Into the future or the past, I don’t, for certain know which’. Getting late the guests start to leave. Although ‘it sounds plausible tonight’ the dinner guests ‘wait for the common sense of the morning’.

Join now!

In the future the time traveller met two kinds of species the Elois and the Morlocks. The Elois are evolved members of the upper class. However they are neither advanced nor intellectual beings. In actual fact they are lazy, dim-witted and ‘indescribably frail’. To a certain extent their beautiful utopian civilization has made them weak and foolish both physically and mentally and can do nothing for themselves. In contrast the ape like Morlocks are evolved members of the working class. The time traveller theorizes that through the centuries the working class have been constantly forced underground and after awhile have ...

This is a preview of the whole essay