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Time Traveler

Decent Essays

Wells purposely uses a first person frame narration to leave a more profound impression upon the reader. The embedded narrator serves to connect with the readers in a way that the Time Traveller (TT) cannot, he distances readers from the TT and, by doing so leaves them sceptical of the ambiguous and fictional nature of the story. In the extract, the narrator reveals that the TT’s character cannot be understood easily, since he is not an average human but “one of those men who are too clever to be believed… [and] had more than a touch of whim among his elements” (Wells 11). It is disclosed that the TT’s motives could not be perceived by anyone, suggesting that perhaps he is not meant to be understood by anyone, be it the narrator himself or the readers.

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The narrator has not seen the future himself, he is bound by time and only has second-hand knowledge of the events experienced by the TT giving rise to doubt regarding the truthfulness of the story. How are the readers to know that TT is telling the truth, and how do they know that the narrator is telling the story exactly as he was told - not adding his own perspective. The narrator explicitly tells us that the TT is not trusted by even his friends. His late arrival to the dinner party in a dishevelled state could be explained in other ways than time travel that make sense. The narrator might well suspect that the TT is staging a hoax like he did earlier “the ghost [he] showed us last Christmas” (Wells 11) which is now acknowledged as a “trick” (11). The fact that the Traveller enjoys pranks and practical jokes further creates doubt in readers’ minds regarding the Traveller’s reliability as a narrator and thus the reliability of the embedded

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