29 pages • 58 minutes read
Harlan Ellison"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Inhumanity of Authority
Harlan Ellison begins the story by quoting at length from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which is about the duty of individuals to resist the government if it overrules their consciences or attempts to make them act unjustly. The controlling metaphor in this quote is that of “machines” or “wooden men”—people who are not fully human. The rest of the story depicts a strict governmental authority that reduces and constrains the humanity of the characters in the society, which itself is compared to a machine with “cams and mainsprings” (148). Within this machine, people are reduced to cogs and wheels that either support or threaten the healthy functioning of the whole. The factory workers for the Timkin roller-bearing plant, for instance, walk in a robotic lockstep as they leave or enter their shifts, while the Ticktockman, who polices everyone’s punctuality, may actually be a machine instead of a human behind his mask.
Treating people as part of a societal machine endangers their human relationships. At the end of the story, the Ticktockman says that Pretty Alice has turned in her lover, the Harlequin, out of a desire to “conform.” While this may be a lie on the part of the Ticktockman, the story illustrates the cruelty of the society in a vignette about the Delahanty family. When Mrs. Delahanty receives a turn-off notification, she hopes it is not for her: “Let it be for Marsh […], or one of the kids, but not for me, please dear God, not for me” (152). Although her grief and horror are genuine when Mrs. Delahanty finds out that the notification is for her husband, this moment of unfiltered selfishness reveals that the rigid expectations of the society have chilled the hearts of people toward their loved ones.
In contrast, it is the Harlequin’s unrestrained enthusiasm and passion—his humanity—that make him so unique. His “personality” seems like a “disease long-defunct, now, suddenly, reborn in a system where immunity had been forgotten” (148) to the higher classes. But for the working classes, his antics remind them of “joy and childhood and holidays” (148), in contrast to the rigor and lifelessness of the society around them. In the end, while the Harlequin retains his elfin charm, he has been brainwashed to agree with the authorities. However, his rebellion appears to have had a small effect. The Ticktockman’s lateness suggests that some essential messiness is endemic to humanity and will ultimately win by degrees.
Play and Nonviolence in Revolution
The Harlequin’s rebellion has two approaches: changing the minds of the working classes, and frustrating the authorities. For the first, the Harlequin uses his clown-like demeanor to surprise and delight, drawing attention to his cause. In his first scene, he “[sticks] out his tongue, roll[s] his eyes and [goes] wugga-wugga-wugga” (148) and rains jelly beans down on the factory workers; in another scene, he uses a bullhorn to preach to shoppers: “Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! … Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don’t be slaves of time” (153). These moments of harmless absurdity make the Harlequin famous, elevating him to the status of folk-hero and spreading his message further.
For his second tactic, the Harlequin focuses on inconveniencing and humiliating the state. He is three and a half hours late when he is ordered to appear before the Ticktockman, which disrupts the schedule of the authorities. His jelly beans cause a seven-minute delay in the System, which is called “a disaster of major importance” (149). In one scene, he publicly captures and strings up the Ticktockman’s agents in webs, then mocks them while everyone else laughs. But in all his demonstrations, the Harlequin cares about “personal safety.” None of his schemes involve physical harm. Even at the end of the story, his threat to “fit [his] fist into [the Ticktockman’s] mouth” (154) is empty, and he knows it.
The joyless state, however, does use a distant, sanitized violence to control its citizens. When people aren’t punctual, minutes and days of their lives are claimed by the Ticktockman using a bureaucratic “scientific expedient” (151). If lateness is habitual, the state takes their lives, but not with torture, gore, or spectacle. Instead, they are quietly “turned off.” When the Ticktockman finally catches the Harlequin, he enacts extreme mental violence through brainwashing, leaving the Harlequin “destroyed,” an acquiescent shell of himself. The narrator suggests that such casualties are a part of every revolution: “[Y]ou can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” (155); such sacrifices are worthwhile if they bring real change. Ultimately, the story’s point of view about the efficacy of playful nonviolent revolution is ambiguous; while the state itself and its citizens seem destined to return to the status quo, the Ticktockman has been minutely changed, and it’s unclear what the result of this change will be.
Capitalism’s Control of Time
The society Ellison depicts in this story prides itself on timeliness and order, claiming that these values have something in common with “unity and equality” (149). However, although the Ticktockman talks about “belonging,” the story doesn’t show scenes of people connecting with or befriending each other, nor does it show people’s lives benefiting materially from their attention to order. Nothing suggests that the System maintained by the Master Timekeeper and other authorities is serving a more peaceful or prosperous society.
Instead, the story focuses on the System as a tool for capitalism. In the scene where the Harlequin dumps jelly beans on factory workers during their shift change, there is a casual reference to the “Time-Motion Study Building.” The name of this building is not explained, but it appears in the same scene that describes the factory workers’ movement as a “metronomic left-right-left” (147). Reading into its name—a place studying the relationship between time and motion—evokes a society that polices even the way its workers walk, maximizing the efficiency and order of simple movements so that they can better fit the master schedule.
This master schedule runs not only people’s individual lives but also the economy of the society. It needs to be maintained primarily for factories to run and quotas to be met. In the section illustrating how the System came to be, several of the vignettes revolve around commerce. A person explains regretfully to a business colleague named Fred how they couldn’t wait for him to take a customer’s order and make a sale. Another is a simple statement from a boss letting someone know their salary has been docked “for twenty minutes time lost” (150). People’s lives are reduced to their worth to the System, a worth that is measured in jobs and sales.
When the Harlequin targets the Efficiency Shopping Center, his tirade attracts a crowd, which delays the shoppers on their errands. As a result, “the purchasing needs of the System [are] therefore falling behind and so measures [are] taken to accelerate the cycle for the rest of the day” (153-54). But the System can’t accommodate this disruption; sales of nonsensically named items like wegglers and poplis become unpredictable, throwing off shipping and routing until “even the swizzleskid industries [feel] it” (154). This is the last straw for the Ticktockman, who orders his agents not to return without capturing the Harlequin. Ultimately, it is commercial output, not personal or societal harmony, that the System looks to protect.
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