The Time Machine

One of the small and pretty Eloi people, the Traveller meets Weena when she nearly drowns in a creek and he rescues her. The two become friends. Her name expresses the child-like quality of her people. Like the rest of the Eloi, Weena is sweet and gentle, but she lacks intelligence and willpower. Her life consists of playing, flirting, picking flowers, and eating fruit. Normally without fear, Weena exhibits a strong terror at anything to do with the Morlocks. Unthinkingly devoted to the Time Traveller, she wants to be always with him. This will lead to her undoing at the hands of hungry Morlocks who finally wrest her from the Traveller during his overland excursions. Weena’s tragic situation—her inability to take care of herself—is shared by all Eloi, who, sheep-like, succumb to the carnivorous needs of the Morlocks.

The narrator introduces the Time Traveller to the reader in the opening chapters of the novel and follows his progress in the closing chapters. As one of the author’s chief voices, the narrator is the Traveller’s salon guest most sympathetic to the claim that time travel is possible. He is rewarded with the sight of the Traveller and his time machine disappearing into time. His experience bespeaks Wells’s idea that people must believe in their own future or they will lose it.

Each Thursday, the Time Traveller hosts a dinner and discussion group at his well-to-do home. Often attending, in addition to the narrator, are a Psychologist, a Medical Man, a doubter named Filby, an Editor (given the name “Blank,” as if to mock his mindless skepticism), and a Very Young Man. Other guests include a Provincial Mayor, two men named Dash and Chose, and “a quiet, shy man with a beard” (14). These characters likely represent specific people known to the author—who was known to include real persons in his stories—and are added to his novel either as honorifics or as objects of ridicule.

The Eloi are the small, pretty, pleasant people of the far future, a population dedicated to simple enjoyments and love-making. The name Eloi recalls the English word elite but also the Hebrew word Elohim, meaning gods. They’ve long since lost much of their intellectual power, and they do not understand that their carefully curated life of comfort and plenty is managed by an underground civilization of apelike humans who raise the Eloi somewhat like ranch animals. Their plight symbolizes the author’s warning that incautious upper-class people might one day find themselves the victims of their own mistreated servants.

Long ignored, the Morlocks—a word that suggests morbid, mortal, and warlock—are the underground workers of a far-future human civilization. They are apelike creatures who manage their cousins, the Eloi, as farm animals to be tended and eaten. Though he understands how and why the Morlocks have evolved, and though he feels no respect for their victims the Eloi, the Time Traveller nonetheless dislikes the underground creatures and throws his support to the vapid abovegrounders. He also understands the irony of wishing ill to the Morlocks—who, after all, are his own distant descendants. His dilemma points up just one of the ugly outcomes of a human civilization that mistreats its own workers and then forgets that they even exist.