Reflections on The Sleeper Awakes I: Discerning Truth

Trey Smith

The Sleeper Awakes was first published by H. G. Wells in 1899 and later updated in 1910. It's an interesting novel in that it takes the basic idea of Washington Irving in his short story, Rip Van Winkle and turns it into a dystopian tale.

While Irving's character sleeps for a mere 20 years, Wells' protagonist, Graham, enters into some sort of a trance and comes out of it 203 years later!! In time, he discovers that, via compound interest, his bank account has grown so large that he basically owns the entire world!

While he's been in repose, his person has taken on mythic proportions. To the people, he has become almost like a god. The world they live in is far bleaker than it is now and so, via his awakening, the people have manufactured this belief that he will turn their dismal lives into some sort of utopia.

As Graham emerges from his trance, he encounters a most severe problem: He doesn't know what the truth is! He doesn't know if up is up or down is down. One of the themes throughout the novel is the varying groups within the society who try to sell Graham on their version of what is and what is not.

In my mind's eye, one of the ideas Wells is trying to get across is that truth is subjective. What is true, moral, right or ethical depends on a person's perspective. Each group presents the truth to Graham as they see it and, not surprisingly, one group's truth is another group's lie. It takes Graham a good deal of the book to try to figure out what he believes is true from his 19th century perspective.

This same basic concept is promoted in the ancient Taoist texts. Both Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi point out that what may be true in one situation or circumstance may not be true in the next. What might be true or moral for one society may or may not be the same a generation or two later.

I know that many people believe in the idea of absolute truth, something that exists beyond human comprehension. While that may be "true," in one sense, it would seem to me that the absoluteness of that truth still depends on the subjective perspective of someone (God) or something (nature). Remove that someone or something from the equation and the absoluteness goes bye-bye.