Answer TWO of the following:
Q1: Is the Time Traveler a reliable narrator? How might his
own biases and beliefs color his narrative, particularly when describing the
Eloi and the Morlocks? Is there anywhere we can tell that Wells might be
critiquing the Traveler himself?
Q2: In Marina Warner’s Introduction to the Penguin version
of The Time Machine, she notes that in many of Wells’ fictions, “He show
an almost anorexic fascination with feeding, hunger, and abstemiousness.” Why
do you think Wells (and the Time Traveler), as a late Victorian, is so
drawn to the idea of eating in the novel? What might food—and the choice of
food—have to do with taboos and the evolution of man?
Q3: Why does the narrator decide to take Weena back to his
own time? Is he romantically interested in her? Or does she represent something
important and ‘scientific’ to the Time Traveler? (you might also consider why
she dies; why doesn’t he protect her?)
Q4: Toward the end of the novel the Time Traveler “grieved
to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed
suicide.” Of course, since this is science fiction, Wells probably means that his own time had “committed
suicide” in the same way. What do you think this means?
How can an entire society decide to put an end to the “dream of the human
intellect”?
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