this is the life
...the Morlocks, ugly, fearsome, and subterranean.”(Molson Pg.600) The Morlocks live under ground in a subterranean environment running machines and underground factories. Due to their adaptations to their underground living environment, the Morlocks only come to the upper world in the dark, for they cannot stand the glare of sunlight. “They are strange little beings whose pallid bodies are just the half-bleached color of the worms and things one sees preserved in spirit in a zoological museum. They are chinless, and in their faces are set great lidless, pinkish grey eyes that glow of red. At night they leave their subterranean world to hunt down Eloi for food.”(McConnell Pg.3865) The next character is the Time Traveler himself, who remains nameless throughout the whole novel. He is an inventor with an infatuation of the future and Darwin’s theory of the fourth dimension. The Time Traveler is middle class citizen, just as Wells was in his day. The traveler is highly concerned with the world to come and has spent years perfecting his spectacular machine. “ ‘It took two years to make,’ retorted the Time Traveler.”(Wells Pg.14) The next character is Weena. Weena is one of the Eloi who befriends the Time Traveler after he saves her from drowning in a nearby stream. Even though, in the beginning, the Time Traveler states that no gender can be determined of these creatures, he seems to be sure that Weena is female. The way Weena acts around the Time Traveler is like that of a pet or small child. She cannot perform any humane actions, talking, logically thinking, Etc. “It is also no accident that language itself has declined to a very simple level, for language is what marks the human intellectual capacity to question, evaluate, and explore. Weena can do none of these things.”(Magill Pg.867) Lastly there is the narrator of the story, Mr. Hillyer. Mr. Hillyer doesn’t really play a main image in the story line, he is merely there to relay the story. Mr. Hillyer is a guest of the Time Traveler, who has been invited to dinner. Mr. Hillyers curiosity gets the best of him and he seeks to find the truth of the Time Traveler and his machine. The division of capitalist verses laborer is the main conflict the story revolves around. “A final horror is the realization that both Eloi and Morlock are descendants of the human race and represent the natural culmination of the stratification of the struggles between the capitalist and laborer divided society of the late nineteenth century.”(Molson Pg.600) The capitalist Eloi became too reliant on the laborer Morlocks to run the machines and factories, and to keep the intelligence of the human race ongoing. The Eloi preferred to frolic and live carefree in their utopian Garden of Eden the world had become. “By the year 800,000, the world, at least above ground, was co-operative , truly a modern utopia. Nature had been subjugated and man had readjusted the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit his needs. Disease, hardship, and poverty were eliminated.”(McConnell Pg.3865) The Morlock in turn took the industrialization into the subterranean underground. The Morlocks retained some of their intelligence, unlike the Eloi, by revolving their lives around mechanical industrialization. And when food became scarce, the Morlocks turned to what instincts they had left and became cannibalistic of the Eloi. “While the upper- worlders drifted to physical and mental ineffectiveness, the lower-worlders drifted to mere mechanical industry. However, since machines, no matter how perfect, require some intelligence to maintain, the Morlocks managed to retain some of their intellectual strength, and, when the process of feeding the under-world became disrupted, the cosmic process reasserted itself and the Morlocks emerged to eat the Eloi.”(McConnell Pg.3866) One of the most incredible aspects of this book is the way that Wells uses it as a device to foreshadow what he thought the world and human race would come to if society didn’t change their ways. During Wells’s time there was a big line being drawn between the laborers and the capitalists, and Wells clearly saw what direction that line would lead the human race in. At the end of the book, the Time Traveler escapes from the Morlocks by throwin...