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How Does Hg Wells Characterise the Eloi and the Morlocks in “the Time Machine” ?

  • Date Submitted: 11/28/2013 02:42 PM
  • Flesch-Kincaid Score: 52.9 
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From the very beginning of the novel HG Wells makes us pay attention to all the differences - at the beginning between the Time Traveller and the Eloi, later on the Morlocks and the Eloi. He always has the Time Traveller speculating on these new “humans” and shows how his theories morphed throughout the book, the lack of “signs of...social nor economical struggle” of the Eloi and always comparing them to the past as he is yet to meet with the subterranean half of the species.
He compares any and all differences between the two species - showing them as contrasts. The beautiful, fragile, dimwitted Eloi and the brutal, subterranean Morlocks. Even their habitats are opposite as the Morlocks are in the dingy underground shafts with “great shapes like big machines rose out of the dimness” showing darkness and the capacity of mind to make and use these machines, while the Eloi have the light and the dim-witted innocence on the surface. “A tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers” seems like the visual opposite of “the halitus of freshly shed blood”. So, from living alone we can establish that HG Wells is showing the Eloi as the angels who are living in a kind of garden of Eden and the Morlocks as the lingering devils in the bottom of the pit of Hell.
When the Time Traveller first comes face to face with one of the Morlocks he believes it to be a little white deer but when he sees a Morlock and understands what it is he describes it as “a queer, little ape figure [that] was dull white and had strange large greyish-red eyes” the use of the word “ape” makes it seem as though the Time Traveller is hinting at perhaps evolution going backwards, so commenting on the degeneration of this part of mankind. Whilst when he first glances at an Eloi, he thought of them as exquisite little creatures. Proving again that maybe HG Wells really did want to portray one race of exquisite, little angels and one race of ape-like devils scouring around in the dark.
The Time...

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