"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

The beginning of “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” establishes an essential conflict between a heartless government and an individual who acts in accordance with their conscience by quoting extensively from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” What follows, however, is not an earnest discussion of human rights but a darkly funny parable both laughing at and warning about The Inhumanity of Authority.

Ellison develops this theme in a futuristic society with two archetypal characters: the protagonist, the Harlequin, and the antagonist, the Ticktockman. The Ticktockman is introduced first, which builds suspense and urgency; the world under the Ticktockman’s control is lifeless, authoritarian, and frightening. However, the story breaks with previous genre conventions that present robots either as uncontrollable machines bent on killing their masters or paragons of rationality that will save humanity. Here, the Ticktockman represents a kind of arbitrary orderliness that provides the safety of predictability for the society. Ellison never clarifies whether the Ticktockman is, in fact, a robot, but his robotic nature emphasizes that the society seeks to bring humans as close to robots as possible. Most of the other characters are flat, demonstrating the society’s success in deadening the human spirit.

The protagonist’s identity is presented as a mystery at the beginning of the story. Whoever the Harlequin is, he represents chaos and rebellion, threatening the System that runs this world. Ellison repeatedly uses the word “elfin” to describe the Harlequin, a word choice that might seem to downplay his power by making him seem small and silly. But this is the Harlequin’s power. All his antics—the jester’s costume, the jelly beans, the nonsense songs—utilize play as weapons. By channeling nonthreatening whimsy, the Harlequin makes his enemies seem ridiculous.

The Harlequin’s character is the only one developed enough to be a round character, suggesting that it is humanity’s irrational and flawed qualities that make us human. A short domestic scene examines his present-day personal life and internal conflicts. He is clearly affected emotionally by his troubled relationship with Pretty Alice; he is plagued by a nameless guilt that makes him constantly apologize to her and to everyone else. The sin of not fitting in weighs heavily on the Harlequin, even as he knows that the blame lies on the controlling society he lives in.

When the Harlequin’s real name is revealed, the narrator comments that “he wasn’t much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time” (154). This is the only justification given for his revolution; the story doesn’t give him a more complicated backstory or motivation. This suggests he—or someone like him—was inevitable in such a controlling society. It also suggests that such heroes don’t need any particularly heroic qualities, that regular people can fight oppressive power.

The sense of flawed irrepressibility in the Harlequin’s character extends to the story’s diction and grammar. Ellison’s sentences are full of repetition, redundancy, and onomatopoeia, as in his famous run-on paragraph that describes a hail of jelly beans as “bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering” (148). The language is colorful and exciting, tending toward stream of consciousness at times, and these moments of excess and humor lend themselves to the story’s satire. Ellison’s worldbuilding further heightens the absurdity of the society. Citizens must wear specific colors on certain days. The train schedule referenced in one vignette seems intentionally difficult to understand. It’s a society built around one arbitrary rule, and the people who enforce that rule, with the exception of the Ticktockman, are characterized as buffoons. Their titles—commex, fink, mineez—communicate the inscrutability of bureaucratic language, and when they are tasked to hunt the Harlequin, they use a laughably long list of techniques before they catch him, suggesting that they aren’t very good at their jobs.

Inspired by the more experimental styles of New Wave science fiction, Ellison tells the story via an unidentified narrator whose opinions subtly dominate the narrative. They control both the tone and chronology of the story, inserting satirical asides and rhetorical questions. The narrative voice is humorous and snide when describing the rigid world of the Ticktockman, revealing their allegiance to the Harlequin. The narrator also reveals plot information in the order they choose. This lack of adherence to linear plot subverts the story’s obsession with time and correctness, as does the narrator’s anachronistic references to people and objects that don’t exist within the framework of the story. In this way, the narrator acts as a translator or mediator between Ellison’s invented world and the real world.

While there is something whimsical about the name “Ticktockman,” it is the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek commentary that reinforces how deadly his oppression is. But even in the most ridiculous moments, the narrator doesn’t allow the tone to stay lighthearted. The crowd at the International Medical Association roars with laughter at the Harlequin’s victory over the authorities, but at the same moment, the narrator reveals in a flash sideways, another man is sentenced to death. “Don’t laugh,” the narrator says, “it isn’t funny” (153). The narrator never lets readers forget that the Ticktockman’s rule mirrors real-world totalitarianism.

One way Ellison employs satire is by creating a futuristic world that is still bleakly recognizable. Everyone lives on a tight schedule, but the things they do are unremarkable; people marry, have children, work, travel, and go shopping. The authority figures wield supreme power over life and death but also function like modern-day bureaucrats. Even the names Ellison invents for products in this society, like “wegglers” and “Smash-O,” sound like actual products from the 1960s, an indictment of Capitalism’s Control of Time in the real world. Unlike Golden Age science fiction stories with epic battles against sorcerers and aliens, it is the banality of this dystopian society that lends itself to the story’s blend of humor and terror.

After beginning with Thoreau, the narrator ends the story with a reference to another book, George Orwell’s dystopian cautionary tale 1984. Setting the story of the playful but doomed Harlequin between two serious examinations of authoritarian power is a bitter reminder that the struggle to keep one’s humanity intact against inhumane authority is a timeless one.