Humankind in The Three Forster Short Stories

Humankind in The Three Forster Short Stories

Forster is writing in a time when society was changing dramatically.

When rural life in the countryside was leaving while urban life was

starting. While this is happening mechanically it was also happening

in a mental aspect and the way people live and look at life is

changing. What Forster sees is dangerous results. He was probably

writing in a time like the Industrial revolution when a lot of lives

were taken for the good of experimentation and knowledge. There was

also a view of slave trade and sweatshops for cheap labour as well as

hiring children to risk their lives and go inside the machines to fix

them because only they could fit. Not to mention the pollution view of

it, which was, and still is destroying Forster's passion, nature. Has

humankind lost its way? Clearly in Forsters eyes he thinks so.

For my coursework essay I am going to discuss Forsters view of

humankind and its place in nature.

In each of the stories there is an aspect of nature. We can treat this

as the simplest fact. However if we take it one-step further we can

say The story of Panic is the Past, The Curates Friend is the present

and The Machine Stops is the future judging by the technology,

Machinery and stubbornness by the characters in each story. Different

things in each of these represent nature. In The Story of Panic (The

Past) Nature is represented by the woods, which is reasonable and

quite correct. In The Curates Friend ( The Present ) The Countryside

is represented by nature, which is getting quite strange since most of

Britain is the countryside! And finally in The Machine Stops ( The

Future) The...

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...e can see from this essay Forster is initiating a warning to

humankind. We can see that Forster wants us to be more in contact with

nature in order to mature our souls and spirits. He sees that people

are just living for the sake of living having no purpose in life and

is trying to threaten us or give us a warning that danger lies ahead

if we carry on this way, such as The ending of The Machine Stops when

Vashti and her son Kuno try to reach the surface of the Earth but

don't make it in time because the machine breaks and blows up and so

they end up dieing by the thing in which the lived and relied on or so

many years.

I can safely tell you that the most important message Forster is

trying to tell us for these three stories and possibly the rest of his

nature based story is "Technology will fail us, and Nature wont."