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| Klee, Fugue in Red (1921) |
NOTE: Sadly, I have to CANCEL TUESDAY'S CLASS AS WELL, since my wife has to go to Norman for a minor procedure which will render her unable to drive home. So we'll have to pick this up NEXT Thursday. Sorry about this...but it gives you extra time to read and finish the questions! Don't forget, too, about the Art and Literature paper for Wells if you need to do it.
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? ALSO: any connections to our other novel about food, Alice in Wonderland?
Q3: Why does the narrator decide to take Weena back to his own time? And what exactly is the true nature of their relationship? Is he like a Peter Pan to her Wendy? Or is he merely interested in her scientifically, as a specimen to bring back as proof (like he does the flower she gives him)?
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”? (Consider, too, that WWI is right around the corner, though he couldn’t quite see this…)
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