CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTES

CHAPTER 2

Summary

The narrator continues with further description of the Time Traveller, and meditation on the previous night’s engagement, explaining that part of the men’s skepticism lay in the Time Traveller’s reputation for being clever and somewhat tricky. Then, it is Thursday again, and another group of men gather at his house for dinner and discussion. Only three of the men from last Thursday’s engagement are present, the narrator, the Doctor and the Psychologist. The men are assembled, but the Time Traveller himself is curiously absent, though apparently had expected that he would be as he left a note for them to start without him if he were not present. The men do so, and as they speculate where he could be, the narrator suggests that he is out time traveling. As the Psychologist explains to the men who had not seen the demonstration the week before, the Time Traveller himself enters, pale, dirty and limping.

After recovering himself with a bit of wine, refusing to answer questions, he leaves to clean up and dress, and promising to tell the story when he returns. When he does return he refuses to tell the story until he has eaten, “starving for a bit of meat,” he says, but does confess to time traveling when asked by the narrator. The men sit uncomfortably through the rest of dinner, not knowing what to make of the situation, and then, when finished, the Time Traveller suggests they retire to the smoking-room for the tale. He promises to tell every bit of his seemingly unbelievable tale if the guests promise not to interrupt, to which they unanimously agree. Thus, the Time Traveller begins, claiming that at four o’clock that very day he was in his lab, but since then he had lived eight days.

Notes

This is the final chapter before the Time Traveller begins to narrate the story, completely taking over the job from the narrator, who will not be heard from again until the very end of the novel. Before the Time Traveller begins, the narrator offers an overall description of the narration, and expresses “the inadequacy of pen and ink...to express [the] quality” of the Time Traveller’s tale. The setting for the telling of the story is given, with the men sitting around the Time Traveller in firelight, hanging on to his every word. Again, the men at the party are in a place representative of the reader, as they express their skepticism but are eager to hear what the Time Traveller has to say. The Time Traveller has asked his listeners to suspend their disbelief just as Wells asks his readers to do the same.

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