29 pages • 58 minutes read
Harlan Ellison"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Masks and Disguises
Masks and disguises are a central symbol in the story; both titular characters, the Harlequin and the Ticktockman, exist publicly but anonymously. The Harlequin’s jester disguise evokes laughter from the lower classes and anger from the middle and upper classes. It also obscures his identity and, to some extent, his humanity. When the Ticktockman receives the Harlequin’s timecard and cardioplate, he says, “This is what he is […] but not who he is” (147). The story never provides a backstory for his real-life identity of Everett C. Marm or an explanation of how he became the Harlequin. His role as a symbol of rebellion against the System is more important than his individuality. The Ticktockman’s identity is similarly obscured; he wears a mask in public and is only called by his official title or his nickname, never a given name. His disguise, though it is not described, seems to evoke respect and fear from everyone around him.
These disguises underscore the symbolic, larger-than-life nature of both of these characters. They also suggest that the society depicted within the story is one where the humanity of everyone, from factory workers to government functionaries to Pretty Alice, is flattened to fit the role they are expected to play.
Jelly Beans
One of the most famous sections of the story is the paragraph about the “one hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jelly beans” (148) that the Harlequin spills over the factory workers as they change shifts. It is primarily composed of one long run-on sentence describing the chaos and joy caused by the hail of jelly beans. In this paragraph, Ellison focuses on color, flavor, sound, and action, momentarily brightening up the dull “universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness” (148). The factory workers are delighted to see the jelly beans; they laugh and scrape up the candy and eat them, a pause that causes a seven-minute delay in the System and angers the authorities.
The jelly beans not only represent “all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays” (148) but also nonsensical excess in a society that values practicality and exactitude. Why are there so many jelly beans? How did the Harlequin afford them? And where did he get them? These are questions the narrator asks and that the System, which cannot tolerate the unknown, tries to answer with “a team of Situation Analysts” (149). These questions are not answered, however, showing that order can never completely control or eradicate chaos.
Sound
Ellison uses the motif of sound throughout the story both to establish and criticize the robotic regularity that rules this society. The Ticktockman’s name evokes the sound of ticking machinery, and the society is full of machines and people that make mechanical noises: the humming of the Harlequin’s airboat, the purring of the faxbox, the “metronomic right-left-right of the 2:47 shift” (147) of factory workers. These sounds highlight the power of mechanized time in the story. After the vignettes about the society’s rigid adherence to punctuality, the narrator says, “And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule” (150).
Only the Harlequin uses sound to disrupt. Associated with laughter and loudness, he goes “wugga-wugga-wugga” (148) at ladies on the slidewalk, his jellybeans make “a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering” (148), he sings “a little song about moonlight” (149), and he uses a bullhorn to berate shoppers at the New Efficiency Shopping Center. The Harlequin’s presence inspires more chaotic sound and loudness in other citizens, who “howl” and “laugh” and “roar” when he is around, signifying that humor and expressiveness can have revolutionary power.
Related Titles
By Harlan Ellison
