The Time Machine: pre-class response

As someone who wants to major in international communication the thing that struck with me the most was the Time Travelers interaction with the two groups of the future (the Eloi and the Morlocks) and his assessment of the way things are in the future and how they came to be that way. He seemed to right away judge his surrounding and make assumptions in terms of the world he knew and grew up in, despite the fact that he was over 800,000 years in the future. I believe that looking at new surroundings with that degree of bias will lead to false assumptions especially when one is in a setting so different from what one is used to. He keeps coming up with theories that he himself later claims were “only half-truths – or only as glimpse of one of the facets of the truth” (page 38). On page 42 he once again claims the theory he created at the time was later proven false, and in Chapter 7 after he encounters the Morlocks in their habitat his theories are once again shaken and reformed. To use a social science term he was looking at the world through his lens and the lens of his society, which one can’t do in such a foreign setting, the world he finds himself in doesn’t even have the human race as he knows it and only deteriorating remnants of past societies but he judges it based on the principles of the world where he grew up. Which is why I was skeptical about the Time Travelers theories, especially since he kept disproving his own theories one after the other, not always entirely, but he still based his actions and judgments on his theories and then was like “oops well here is this whole other aspect to the situation I didn’t even know about” which makes me wonder what else was he oblivious to during his stay in 802,701 AD.

Another thing that got to me was that more than once he claims to be superior, and due to this often finds himself unprepared in situations that he charges into without much planning or rational thought, him being a scientist I expected more from him. For example when despite the fact that the Eloi are disturbed greatly by darkness and the “wells” he just decides to climb down without thinking about the nature of the “white creatures” or the fact that he may need light or a weapon, he just blindly charges into a situation. In that sense I found him acting “childlike” a quality he often attributes to the Eloi who he finds to be of inferior intelligence.

Plus he is making assumptions concerning all humanity looking at just one area and group of “people” (the Eloi) then later when he discovers another race (the Morlocks) he just makes new assumptions, I just kept expecting a bigger picture. I understand that the author used these two races as a social commentary and used the Time Traveler to convey this idea but like I said the Time Traveler’s approach didn’t seem that rational to me most of the time, so although I find the idea of a worker class turned carnivore and elite class turned hedonistic interesting, I can’t take the Time Traveler’s ideas as truths of that world and I feel like there is so much more to it. To me it is similar to what the European explorers did: show up at a new place, claim the natives to be savages and apply their own standards to their societies. I just wanted the Time Traveler to be less narrow minded, more cautious (rather than randomly act belligerent, burn down half the forest and probably cause the death of Weena due to poor planning and rash actions) and more interested in learning about the two cultures he discovered and learning how they got to be that way. I feel like superimposed his own take on reality onto this futuristic world rather than actually learn about it.