This is a story about a man who attempts time
travel.
He proposes the idea to a group of friends
at his home, but they dismiss the idea due
to a lack of understanding.
He asks them to come back to his house a week
later for dinner, to which he returns from
his first time travel experience.
The Time traveller claims that he travelled
in a time machine to a Utopian world in the
future.
In this world, he meets little people called
Eloi.
They are childlike in both size and intellect,
which fascinates him because he would have
thought that humans of the future would be
smarter and more sophisticated.
As he explores this new society, he discovers
that his time machine has been dragged into
the foot of a statue.
Seeing as he can't get to his machine, he
continues to explore the community, noting
several deep wells throughout the city.
He climbs down the well and discovers the
Morlocks, a group of ape-like men who live
underground and are afraid of fire.
He escapes the Morlocks and decides to travel
to a green building in the distance for more
answers.
The green building, he discovers, is an old
museum with several exhibits.
Most of the exhibits are destroyed, but he
finds matches, which happen to scare away
the Morlocks.
He also realizes that the Morlocks are eating
the Eloi.
He sets the forest on fire and the Morlocks
panic and catch on fire.
He eventually gets back into the machine and
travels further into the future, seeing the
rise of crab people and the end of the Earth.
When he finishes telling the story of his
travels, the men at his house don't believe
him.
Despite their lack of imagination, the time
traveller goes back into the time machine
and vanishes.
While this story was not the first to mention
the idea of time travel, it has been one of
the most influential in the realm of science
fiction.
The Time Traveller's theories about the future
civilization change frequently, which loosely
demonstrates the scientific process.
He theorizes at first that the future society
is Utopian, then Communist, and then revolutionary.
The style in which the story is told is important.
The story is told in a second-hand account,
yet the narrator simply lets the time traveller
explain the entire story, making it seem like
the story is being told in first-person.
More importantly, by allowing the story to
be told in second-person from a first-person
perspective, this lets the story be told and
continued, since if the story was told from
the perspective of only the time traveller,
how would the time traveller tell the story
if he is still travelling time?
Does that make sense?
In other words, a story about time travel
is strongest when told in first-person because
of all of the descriptive images we, as the
reader, will experience through the character.
However, because the time traveller has continued
to time travel, if he was the narrator, the
audience would not know about his first time
travel trip until after he came back from
his second trip, or if he came back.
Story perspective can be just as confusing
as time travel.
If you try to trace the sequence of events,
it gets messy.
