How was the Time traveller disappointed with the future and the farther future

The Time Traveller expected the people of the future, and their technology to be greatly ahead of ours:

‘I had always anticipated that the people of the year

Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be

Incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything’

He was discouraged to find creatures, as the Time Traveller says ‘on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children’. The Time Traveller was staggered over the difference between what he expected and what he was witnessing. He must have found it very disappointing that these fragile fools were his descendants. The Eloi didn’t take care of their buildings as many of them were ‘very badly broken or weather worn’. This showed that they had lost their carpentry skills and their liking of architecture. They also had no books, which would have frustrated him as he had written a book on physical optics. Seeing as books are learning for the future, no books, no learning. He even thought at one point that he had built the Time Machine in vain.

The Time Traveller, himself being an inventor, was saddened to find that there was no fire in the future. Without they couldn’t melt metal, which was needed for inventions. ‘the art of fire making had been forgotten on earth’. This book was written at the time of the industrial revolution and without fire it would not have been possible for it to have occurred. It must have seemed a total waste of effort to him building the Time Machine as he didn’t see anything which pleased him while Time Travelling.

When he noticed Weena had disappeared he was disheartened. The Time Traveller had been alone in a strange new world until he met Weena. Now he was alone again. She seemed more human than the others and had a link with the Time Traveller. ‘I was in an agony of discomfort…it left me absolutely lonely again’ he said he felt when he realised Weena had disappeared. This also meant that he couldn’t take her back to his time. He could have just wanted Weena for evidence that he’d been in the future or because he liked her so much. ‘Weena I had resolved to bring with me to our own time’. In the end the Time Traveller was disappointed as he didn’t save Weena.

The Morlocks were a disappointment to the Time Traveller. Instead of the highly intelligent beings he expected, he found savage cannibalistic underworlders. He talks about them negatively saying they were ‘filthy cold to the touch.’ He compares them to spiders worms and even vermin. Things which people usually find creepy. When The Time Traveller talks about the Morlocks the author tries to create fear through metaphors. ‘It was so like a human spider! / these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin’. As the Morlocks stole his Time Machine, it worsened his hate towards them adding to the fact that they eat the Eloi. Unlike the Eloi the Morlocks seemed in better shape [physically] which was discouraging to the Time Traveller as it would make his task of repossessing the Time Machine much more difficult.

After he looked at the natural history gallery the Time Traveller became downcast. This was because all of the things in the gallery were damaged over time. He wouldn’t have been able to see what happened over the years to the environment and to nature. After travelling thousands of years through time he was looking forward to making observations and what was left in the gallery did not reach his expectations:

‘I was

sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace

the patient readjustments by which the conquest of

animated nature had been attained.’

Another thing which he found disconcerting was the fact that he couldn’t communicate with the Eloi . Again he travelled thousands of years through time not being able to learn much about the people or about what happened in the past. ‘I wasted some time with futile questioning,’ is what he said before he started getting frustrated. Him losing the Time Machine was dissatisfying, as he would be stuck in the future because he couldn’t have asked the Eloi where it had gone. He was asking the Eloi important questions while they just laughed at him, which proved to be annoying the Time Traveller considerably:

‘I had the hardest task in the world to keep my

hands off their pretty laughing faces.’

The Eloi didn’t take interest in the Time Traveller as he says ‘for I have never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued’. He thought he was going to be heralded as one of the geniuses of this time but because the Eloi were so backward they couldn’t comprehend what he had just achieved. Instead he was just another ‘toy’ to the Eloi.

When he found the sticks of dynamite he anticipated that he would be able to blast through the bronze doors but they were only dummies. Having expected his Time Machine back and escape from that time only to have his hopes dashed was disenchanting for the Time Traveller. ‘I never felt more disappointment’ is what he felt when he realised they were fake. And without the Time Machine he would be trapped in a strange new world feeling lonely and home sick:

‘I began to think of this house of mine, of

this fireside, of some of you, and, with such thoughts

came a longing that was pain.’

In the farther future the Time Traveller is again disappointed. When he stopped and landed on the beach he found no wind, waves or trees which would have made him feel desolate. All he sees is moss, ‘the uniform poisonous lichen green’ which gives the impression that he doesn’t like it. All the natural things he would have been used to were gone. ‘I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world.’ Which shows that he felt lonely in that dark world. When he went another thousand years ahead, the crabs he saw before were gone. Only the lichens were alive, ‘save for its livid green liverworts and lichens seemed lifeless’ is what he saw of the world. It would have been saddening to the Time Traveller seeing the world he had come to love, dead, with only moss on the surface.