I don’t have many thoughts about The Machine Stops that went unaddressed in class, but I didn’t get to discuss juxtaposition in the way I had wanted.

Forster uses opposites in a few interesting ways in The Machine Stops. Mostly, he uses traditional dichotomies to create tension or enforce a point, but something I noticed was that at the end of the first section, he almost severely placed the natural world next to people worshipping the Machine. While the contrast between the Himalayas and the Machine is striking, the most interesting part of this is the idea that praise of the Machine is just as unnatural as the subject of their prayer. One idea surrounding this comparison is that religion is a thing that was, at the time, considered almost exclusively a natural and just thing, and this juxtaposition serves to highlight their religion as different and evil. Modern conceptions of religion are less supportive of this theory, but given the context for its being written, it seems reasonable.