H.G. Wells' the Time Machine Term Paper

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In the novel, Wells describes the first time that the "Time Traveller" removes himself from reality:

Landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which the house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed -- melting and flowing under my eyes" (McConnell, 30-31).

Thus, as in the novel, the "Time Traveller" is experiencing the rapid alteration of the environment around him via going into the future. For the viewer, this great change shows that the "Time Traveller" is indeed going into the future, where things are quite unknown and the safety of such a journey is undetermined. Cinematically, director George Pal provides the viewer with some fantastic special effects which, incidentally, helped the film to win an Oscar for these effects in 1961.

Of course, the characters in the novel and the film are thoroughly enjoyable, especially that of Weena, played by the beautiful Yvette Mimieux. In this role, Mimieux expresses all of the sentiments of one who is trapped in a world filled with the horrible Morlocks who live underground due to their inability to withstand sunlight. When Weena meets up with the "Time Traveller," he is immediately struck by her beauty and peaceful countenance which ironically soon indicates great passivity and a lack of all aggression. As Wells describes it, the "Time Traveller," after pulling Weena from the river, was greatly affected by her friendliness.

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"She was exactly like a child," he says. "She wanted to be with me always." Yet she lived in world full of fear -- "She was fearless enough in the daylight... But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things" (McConnell, 55).

As a character, Weena represents the opposite of the horrible Morlocks, yet she also symbolizes the world of the future as a young girl without any knowledge of the past or any inclination to know what lies ahead in the future. In the novel and in the film, this device tells the reader and the viewer that the world of the far distant future will be made up of white and black, presumably good and evil, yet is also symbolizes the disparity between the social classes which was very evident in Great Britain when The Time Machine was first published in 1895.

Whether or not the medium of film is more entertaining than the medium of literature is wholly arguable and can only be discussed in the context of imagery. Film provides a visual image on the screen, yet literature accomplishes this too by allowing the reader to visualize the story mentally. Of course, the film version of The Time Machine, despite its visual effects and superb acting, cannot be an improvement on the original idea, due to Wells' extraordinary ability to take the reader into the unknown without the advantage of pure visual imagery as provided by the cinema. However, George Pal's adaptation of the novel has altered the tale somewhat, due to literary license, being the insertion of other images and ideas into the story to improve its visual impact......

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