God And Nature In Kuno's As If A God Made The Machine

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Further, while Kuno chastises his mother for speaking “‘as if a god had made the Machine’”, he views nature with a similarly religious ferocity. In a dialogue between him and Vashti, he says that he “‘prefer[s] the mercy of God’”, to which his mother asks if that means he believes that “‘[he] could live in the outer air’” (Forster 36). Kuno’s response is the most telling moment in this exchange: “Yes”. With this one word reply, Kuno conflates God and nature, saying that God’s “mercy” exists in the “outer air”, the air of nature, not in the realm of the Machine. Thus the two characters, Vashti and Kuno, occupy opposing philosophical views: Vashti is characterized as having a religious reverence to the Machine, the progress of man, while Kuno finds “God” away from that progress. Vashti embodies the movement towards the future; Kuno represents the desire to return to a primeval nature. The conflict between their two schools of thought severs their relationship: following Kuno’s escapade on the planet’s surface “[t]hey never communicated, having nothing …show more content…

The characters can no longer be differentiated from one another as they become part of the word “they”—the destruction of barriers allows them to become part of a single, shared word. And, while their human consciousnesses are still bounded by the single individual, they experience their ends together, thus peeling back the layer final layer of intimacy. In reading “The Machine Stops”, one shouldn’t question whether the world that E. M. Forster has happened, or could happen—that is one folly of reading speculative fiction. The more enduring question, which Forster raises here, and society has yet to come up with a meaningful answer, is how do we deal with our own problems of

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