44 pages • 1 hour read
H. G. WellsThe Time Machine
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 9-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
At sunset, the Time Traveller and Weena begin their trek back to her home. As they cross the dark forest, the Morlocks attack, but he lights some camphor, throws it down, and drives them back. Weena faints, and he is unable to revive her. He realizes that he is turned around and doesn’t know which way is forward.
Quickly he gathers branches and leaves and prepares a bonfire. Again, the Morlocks approach, and he lights camphor, blinding them. One accidentally staggers toward him: He punches it, and it scurries away. He completes his bonfire and, overwhelmed by exhaustion, he shuts his eyes.
The Traveller awakens to hands grabbing at him in the dark. His fire has gone out; he reaches into a pocket but can’t find his box of matches. Swinging his metal truncheon wildly, he cracks a few Morlock skulls and escapes. The Morlocks suddenly run from a glow behind him. He turns and sees a forest fire, ignited by his first clump of lit camphor and burning rapidly toward him. He looks for Weena but she has disappeared.
He runs from the fire alongside the Morlocks and arrives at a barren hill that is quickly surrounded by flames. Blinded by the brightness, dozens of Morlocks stumble about him, moaning. The ones that blunder into him, he drives off with blows. Meanwhile, he becomes convinced that he is dreaming, and he tries shouting and beating the earth with his hands to wake himself up.
At dawn, the Traveller resumes his search for Weena, and he is unable to find her. He ties grasses onto his feet to make his way across the burnt ground, bemoaning the loss of Weena and yearning for the comfort of his house and friends far in the past. All he has for reassurance are a few loose matches in a pocket.
Chapter 10 Summary
Later that morning, the Time Traveller sits once again on the bench where, days earlier, he first viewed the river valley and the beautiful world of the Eloi. Beneath that world, he now knows, lurks the terrifying reality of the Eloi’s carnivorous keepers. Exhausted, he sleeps awhile, then awakens refreshed and walks down the hill to the white sphinx.
The bronze pedestal’s face lies open; inside sits the time machine, nicely cleaned and oiled by the subterranean mechanics. Knowing that this is a trap, the Traveller tosses aside his truncheon and steps inside, and the bronze door promptly slams shut. The Traveller pulls out a match, then he remembers that, without the box and its sandpaper side, it will not light.
Chapter 11 Summary
Once he has overcome the nausea of time travel, the Traveller glances at the gauges and realizes that he has sent the machine forward millions of years into the future rather than back to 19th-century England. Strangely, as the time speeds up, the days slow down until the sun merely wobbles back and forth in the west, growing larger and redder: “The earth had come to rest with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth” (94).
Carefully, he slows the machine to a halt. He finds himself on a twilit beach where greenery abounds nearby. A gigantic butterfly screeches and flies over some nearby hills, while on the ground, a huge crab crawls toward him. He feels something against his cheek and grabs it, only to realize that it is the stalk of a second giant crab’s antenna. The Traveller narrowly escapes becoming their prey by pushing his machine quickly into the future. Here, he finds almost no animal life, a green scum for plant life, and a single, strange, tentacled creature moving fitfully on the land.
Chapter 12 Summary
Horrified by what he sees, the Traveller presses the lever that reverses his time travel. As he approaches his own age, he slows the machine down until it reaches day zero. Just before it stops, he sees his servant, Mrs. Watchett, once again walking across the lab, only this time she is moving backward. Having been moved by the Morlocks to the pedestal of the white sphinx, the time machine now sits on the other side of the lab.
Here, the Time Traveller concludes his story. He admits that it is probably too fantastic to believed, but he asks his guests what they think of it. The guests shuffle their feet and stare at their cigars. The Medical Man gazes thoughtfully at the Traveller, and the Editor stands and suggests that the Traveller would make a great fiction writer.
For a moment, the Traveller wonders if it was all a dream. He leads the group back to his lab where the time machine stands, slightly askew, its parts grass-stained and dented. Thus reassured, he and the guests return to the salon, where they gather their things and bid the Traveller goodbye.
In the cab, the narrator listens to the Editor dismiss the entire episode as a “gaudy lie.” The narrator, however, struggles between belief and disbelief. The next day, he visits the Traveller, who is carrying a camera and a knapsack and asks his guest to wait for him—he will return shortly, he says. The Traveller retreats to his lab while the narrator waits in another room.
The narrator, suddenly remembering that he has another appointment, enters to the lab to make an apology. He opens the door and sees the Traveller seated in the time machine, and he watches it fade out of sight. Realizing now that the Time Traveller’s story was real, he decides to skip the appointment and wait for the Traveller’s imminent return. That was three years ago, however, and since then, no one has seen the Time Traveller.
Epilogue Summary
The narrator wonders where the Traveller ended up in time—he who was a pessimist about humankind’s future and indeed witnessed the disastrous end of humanity’s hopes and dreams. All that is left of the Traveller, his story, and his friendship with an Eloi woman—at least in 1890s London—are two dried and pressed flowers “to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man” (106).
Chapter 9-Epilogue Analysis
The final chapters conclude the Traveller’s battle with the Morlocks, explain his escape from that distant age back to his own time, and witness his final departure in the time machine. A key development in these chapters is the death of Weena, his Eloi companion. As the story concludes, the Time Traveller bemoans the loss of his dear friend, whom he had hoped to bring with him back to his time even though she probably would have hated the noise and smoke and the bewildering machinery of late-19th-century England. He knows she would have wished to return to her own people, but her fate, on returning to the Eloi, would be sealed, herself doomed to become food for the subterraneans. Only if the Time Traveller were present to defend her would she have a chance of survival, a hope that failed anyway during their trek through the dark forest when she was captured by Morlocks.
Returning to the frame narrative, we learn that the narrator has waited for three years for the Time Traveller to return, and he has given up hope. Had the Traveller wanted to, he could have returned to the narrator’s time stream at any point. In other words, the fact that he has never returned suggests that the Traveller has lost his machine, died, or decided to stay in another era. His whereabouts thus remain a mystery, perhaps forever.
Chapter 11 dramatizes the fate of the planet in the far, far distant future, millions or billions of years from now, when he speculates that the sun will cool to a large, dull red. The sequence is considered an early example of a subgenre of science fiction sometimes called Dying Earth stories. Astronomers since Wells’s time have theorized that the sun will probably heat up in a few billion years, rather than cool, and expand until it is large enough to swallow the planets Mercury, Venus, and possibly the Earth. Scientists think that the sun will indeed glow large and red at that time—albeit for the opposite reason.
Wells’s story appeals to the wonder and the worry about humanity’s future, conceived on a vast, evolutionary time scale. This was a new thought in the 19th century, made possible by widespread knowledge of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and discoveries about the Earth’s geologic history. Wells also uses his story to warn that the division of societies into rich and poor might someday lead to the outcome that he depicts, in which both species—laborers and elites—are worse off for the exploitative relations that exist between them.
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