While the image of an individual hard at work on something they care very deeply about is not necessarily meant to invoke feelings of unease, the way Klausner’s intense preoccupation with his machine and its abilities changes throughout the story carries with it a much more insidious nature. By following his character as he embarks on this fraught journey of discovery, Dahl showcases how extreme passion and unbridled curiosity, when left unchecked, can all too easily bleed into obsession and madness.
Right from the story’s beginning, Klausner exhibits a fervency for his work on the machine that portrays him as a dedicated and passionate man. His meticulous attention to both the machine’s complicated innerworkings and his own diagrams and frequent mutterings to himself contribute to his characterization as a man driven by a passion for knowledge, as does the “air of urgency […] of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement” that defines the way he conducts his work. These qualities at first appear to be trampled upon by the arrival of the Doctor, who has come to check on Klausner’s sore throat, an illness he now dismisses as “quite cured.” This interruption makes the absorbed Klausner rather uptight, so much so that even the Doctor notes the “feeling of tension in the room.” He recognizes Klausner’s intense concentration on the machine, noting that Klausner has even forgotten to take his hat off. It is only when the Doctor questions Klausner about his project that his spark of passion fully returns, with the “moth of a man” suddenly launching into a discussion of his hypothesis so animated and detailed that the Doctor promptly excuses himself, noting the dreamy “quality of distance” displayed in the man’s eyes.
As the story goes on and Klausner tests his machine, however, this impassioned professional curiosity begins to give way to a far more sinister form of unhealthy fixation. For one thing, it becomes clearer and clearer that Klausner is prioritizing his work over his own well-being, as the frail man is at one point described as resembling “an ancient, consumptive, bespectacled child.” And while his earlier dismissal towards his sore throat may not represent a cause for alarm by itself, but this characterization continues to portray his health as something he may be neglecting in favor of his commitment to his research.
Furthermore, the way Klausner interacts with the people around him calls into question his grip on reality. He watches his neighbor, Mrs. Saunders, in her garden “without thinking about her at all” due to his fixation with the machine. It is only when he realizes that her roses are the source of the “inhuman shriek” he heard through his earphones that he engages her presence, his intense, excited demeanor making her thoroughly uncomfortable and questioning his sanity much like the Doctor had previously. His call to the Doctor after testing the machine on a tree is also quite revealing of his deteriorating mental state. His plea for the Doctor to come quickly is imbued with the same urgency as someone who is battling a life-threatening illness or had a fatal accident, suggesting that Klausner’s obsession has perhaps bled into a kind of sickness.
By the end of the story, Klausner’s curiosity has finally evolved into an all-consuming obsession that renders him on the brink of abject madness. His previously impassioned hypotheses about the wealth of sounds out of human reach takes a turn as he now considers the ramifications of his discovery with horror instead of excitement. This newfound horror grows into a new obsession with taking care of the tree he has hurt. Even though his hypothesis was wrong, the intensity he approached it with has effectively been carried over to the tree. Klausner’s concern for the tree and its wounds as if it were another person signifies the depths of his mania. It’s interesting to note that he displays more care for it than he does his own health at the beginning of the story, to the point where he even asks the Doctor to come back to tend to it again the next day. This is certainly a far cry from the brusque dismissal he gave the Doctor when questioned about his sore throat. In addition, the “curious, almost […] threatening tone” Klausner takes on when directing the Doctor to dress the tree’s axe wound compounds with the way he holds the axe to make the Doctor feel in danger of a violent outburst. Short of running away, he sees no other option but to comply with his demands and placate him in much the same way he would an unstable patient. The “distance” he once saw in the man’s eyes has now thoroughly consumed him.
To this end, Klausner’s journey from diligent scientific mind to a broken and obsessed shell of a man highlights the pitfalls of unchecked ambition and drive. By portraying him in such a way, Dahl spins a cautionary tale with Klausner at the center, showcasing just how easily one can be swept away in the currents of passion and jeopardize their own health and safety, potentially even losing their very sanity in the process.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Passion vs. Madness ThemeTracker
Passion vs. Madness Quotes in The Sound Machine
It was a warm summer evening and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and he unlocked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him. The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall, on the left, there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child's coffin.
All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly, inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, “Yes…Yes…And now this one…Yes…Yes…But is this right? Is it—where's my diagram?…Ah, yes…Of course…Yes, yes…That's right…And now…Good…Good…Yes…Yes, yes, yes.” His concentration was intense; his movements were quick; there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement.
“It’s just an idea.”
“Well, speaking very roughly, any note so high that it has more than fifteen thousand vibrations a second—we can't hear it. Dogs have better ears than us. You know you can buy a whistle whose note is so high-pitched that you can't hear it at all. But a dog can hear it.”
“Yes, I've seen one,” the Doctor said.
“Of course you have. And up the scale, higher than the note of that whistle, there is another note—a vibration if you like, but I prefer to think of it as a note. You can't hear that one either. And above that there is another and another rising right up the scale forever and ever and ever, an endless succession of notes…an infinity of notes…there is a note—if only our ears could hear it—so high that it vibrates a million times a second…and another a million times as high as that…and on and on, higher and higher, as far as numbers go, which is…infinity…eternity…beyond the stars.”
Klausner was becoming more animated every moment. He was a small frail man, nervous and twitchy, with always moving hands. His large head inclined toward his left shoulder as though his neck sere not quite strong enough to support it rigidly. His face was smooth and pale, almost white, and the pale grey eyes that blinked and peered from behind a pair of steel spectacles were bewildered, unfocussed, remote. He was a frail, nervous, twitchy little man, a moth of a man, dreamy and distracted; suddenly fluttering and animated; and now the Doctor, looking at that strange pale face and those pale grey eyes, felt that somehow there was about this little person a quality of distance, of immense, immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was.
“I believe,” he said, speaking more slowly now, “that there is a whole world of sound about us all the time that we cannot hear. It is possible that up there in those high-pitched inaudible regions there is a new exciting music being made, with subtle harmonies and fierce grinding discords, a music so powerful that it would drive us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound of it. There may be anything…for all we know there may—"
“Yes,” the Doctor said. “But it's not very probable.”
“Why not? Why not?” Klausner pointed to a fly sitting on a small roll of copper wire on the workbench. “You see that fly? What sort of a noise is that fly making now? None that one can hear. But for all we know the creature may be whistling like mad on a very high note, or barking or croaking or singing a song. It's got a mouth, hasn't it? It's got a throat!”
He plugged the wire connections from the earphones into the machine and put the earphones over his ears. The movement of his hands were quick and precise. He was excited, and breathed loudly and quickly through his mouth. He kept on talking to himself with little words of comfort and encouragement, as though he were afraid—afraid that the machine might not work and afraid also of what might happen if it did. He stood there in the garden beside the wooden table, so pale, small, and thin that he looked like an ancient, consumptive, bespectacled child. […] As he listened, he became conscious of a curious sensation, a feeling that his ears were stretching out away from his head, that each ear was connected to his head by a thin stiff wire, like a tentacle, and that the wires were lengthening, that the ears were going up and up toward a secret and forbidden territory, a dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before and had no right to be.
From the moment that he started pulling to the moment when the stem broke, he heard—he distinctly heard in the earphones—a faint high-pitched cry, curiously inanimate. He took another daisy and did it again. Once more he heard the cry, but he wasn't so sure now that it expressed pain. No, it wasn't pain; it was surprise. Or was it? It didn't really express any of the feelings or emotions known to a human being. It was just a cry, a neutral, stony cry—a single emotionless note, expressing nothing. It had been the same with the roses. He had been wrong in calling it a cry of pain. A flower probably didn’t feel pain. It felt something else which we didn't know about—something called toin or spud or plinuckment, or anything you like.
He tried to remember what the shriek of the tree had sounded like, but he couldn’t. He could remember only that it had been enormous and frightful and that it had made him feel sick with horror. He tried to imagine what sort of noise a human would make if he had to stand anchored to the ground while someone deliberately swung a small sharp thing at his leg so that the blade cut in deep and wedged itself in the cut. Same sort of noise perhaps? No. Quite different. The noise of the tree was worse than any known human noise because of that frightening, toneless, throatless quality. He began to wonder about other living things, and he thought immediately of a field of wheat, a field of wheat standing up straight and yellow and alive, with the mower going through it, cutting the stems, five hundred stems a second, every second. Oh, my God, what would that sound be like? […] no, he thought. I do not want to go to a wheat field with my machine. I would never eat bread after that.
