The tone of “The Machine Stops” is both ironic and earnest. Forster’s ironic tone comes across when he is describing the hypocritical culture of the technology-obsessed, inhumane underground society as well as when he is capturing Vashti’s allegiance to such a society. Take the following passage, for example, when the narrator is describing Vashti’s experience aboard the air-ship on her way to visit Kuno:
[A]s often happens on clear nights, [the stars] seemed now to be in perspective, now on a plane; now piled tier beyond tier into the infinite heavens, now concealing infinity, a roof limiting for ever the visions of men. In either case they seemed intolerable. “Are we to travel in the dark?” called the passengers angrily, and the attendant, who had been careless, generated the light, and pulled down the blinds of pliable metal.
The tone in the first part of this passage is quite earnest (and reflective)—the narrator waxes poetic about the beauty of the stars “piled tier beyond tier into the infinite heavens” and how roofs “limit for ever the visions of men.” Then, the narrator moves back into Vashti’s perspective as she thinks to herself that the stars “seemed intolerable.” The clashing of the narrator’s sense of enchantment with the night sky and Vashti’s annoyance with it leads to an ironic tone. Clearly, Forster is siding with the narrator here and highlighting how absurd it is that Vashti (and the rest of the passengers) cannot see what a gift the stars are as they “angrily” ask the flight attendant to close the blinds.
The tone of the story shifts out of the ironic register near the end as Vashti and Kuno—along with everyone else in the underground society—experience the collapse of the Machine and ultimately die amongst the wreckage. Forster has made his point about the absurdity of Vashti’s previously limited way of thinking and, at the end of the tale, lets her and Kuno earnestly grieve together over all that they lost by being raised away from human connection and the natural world.
