Loic Huber
191
In Harlan Ellison's Repent Harlequin Said the Tick-Tock Man, There is a very powerful overtone of criticism vis-a-vis conformity and collectivism. The story is directly tied to Thoreau's’ grandiloquent quote on civil disobedience. He uses his words to describe a world where the masses of men that inhabit this nation are essentially just machines: “They are the standing army...posse comitatus etc.” He insinuates that the average man is simply a cog in a bigger machine, which at all costs is designed to hinder entropy and individualism from prospering. He then declares that politicians are enforcers of logic and not of social platitudes: “Officeholders-serve the state chiefly with their heads; and as they rarely make any moral distinctions.” The most elite of society are not cogs, but rather a “pendulum” which is designed to keep the cogs in an individual kind of lilliputian order (essential keeps the gears turning), which in turn leads to a macrocosm of governmental structure and monotony. Finally, he states that the dissentient, the very few that are true “heroes, patriots, martyrs,reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences …show more content…
“A desk pad. Day for day, and turn each day. 9:00-open the mail. 9:45-appointment with planning commission board. 10:30-discuss installation progress charts with J.L…. And so it goes.” This mundane repetition is not to be broken, and it symbolizes the function of the gears in a clock, one cog, no matter how minute, can interfere with the functions of the macrocosm (society and government.) Tick-Tock man is designed to punish those that don’t follow the stipulations that are enforced. Those that do not conform, are infracted upon; The Tick-Tock man reduces the time-span of the dissident. “If he was ten minutes late (as he shouldn’t be), he lost ten minutes of his
191
In Harlan Ellison's Repent Harlequin Said the Tick-Tock Man, There is a very powerful overtone of criticism vis-a-vis conformity and collectivism. The story is directly tied to Thoreau's’ grandiloquent quote on civil disobedience. He uses his words to describe a world where the masses of men that inhabit this nation are essentially just machines: “They are the standing army...posse comitatus etc.” He insinuates that the average man is simply a cog in a bigger machine, which at all costs is designed to hinder entropy and individualism from prospering. He then declares that politicians are enforcers of logic and not of social platitudes: “Officeholders-serve the state chiefly with their heads; and as they rarely make any moral distinctions.” The most elite of society are not cogs, but rather a “pendulum” which is designed to keep the cogs in an individual kind of lilliputian order (essential keeps the gears turning), which in turn leads to a macrocosm of governmental structure and monotony. Finally, he states that the dissentient, the very few that are true “heroes, patriots, martyrs,reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences …show more content…
“A desk pad. Day for day, and turn each day. 9:00-open the mail. 9:45-appointment with planning commission board. 10:30-discuss installation progress charts with J.L…. And so it goes.” This mundane repetition is not to be broken, and it symbolizes the function of the gears in a clock, one cog, no matter how minute, can interfere with the functions of the macrocosm (society and government.) Tick-Tock man is designed to punish those that don’t follow the stipulations that are enforced. Those that do not conform, are infracted upon; The Tick-Tock man reduces the time-span of the dissident. “If he was ten minutes late (as he shouldn’t be), he lost ten minutes of his