Harlan Ellison begins the story by quoting at length from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which is about the duty of individuals to resist the government if it overrules their consciences or attempts to make them act unjustly. The controlling metaphor in this quote is that of “machines” or “wooden men”—people who are not fully human. The rest of the story depicts a strict governmental authority that reduces and constrains the humanity of the characters in the society, which itself is compared to a machine with “cams and mainsprings” (148). Within this machine, people are reduced to cogs and wheels that either support or threaten the healthy functioning of the whole. The factory workers for the Timkin roller-bearing plant, for instance, walk in a robotic lockstep as they leave or enter their shifts, while the Ticktockman, who polices everyone’s punctuality, may actually be a machine instead of a human behind his mask.

Treating people as part of a societal machine endangers their human relationships. At the end of the story, the Ticktockman says that Pretty Alice has turned in her lover, the Harlequin, out of a desire to “conform.