Clocks Symbol Analysis

Around the World in Eighty Days was published in 1873, just after the Industrial Revolution. During this period, Western society made a general shift away from a predominately agrarian way of life and toward urbanization, factory work, and modern modes of transportation. As a result of this more mechanized and routinized lifestyle, time became an increasingly important presence in people’s day-to-day activities, as they now had to keep exact time in order to perform their work and navigate their cities successfully (wristwatches came about in 1868 for this reason). This modern reliance on time is evident in the clocks that Phileas Fogg and his servant Jean Passepartout obsessively focus on throughout the novel. Fogg synchronizes his entire life down to the second based on the complicated clock he keeps in his house which keeps track of the hours, minutes, seconds, days, months, and years. He also keeps meticulous track of the time lost and gained during his journey around the world in eighty days. Passepartout, too, becomes preoccupied with time; he is plagued with anxiety over every delay throughout their journey and refuses to change his watch over from London time. These clocks serve as a constant, ticking reminder of man’s futile efforts to harness control over time and the rest of the natural world using technology. Fogg and Passepartout’s fraught fixation on clocks and watches represents the broader societal shift happening around their contemporary period, as modernization changed people’s relationship with time and caused them to adapt their lives to abide by the new machines they relied upon.