In chapter 5 of The Glass Bees, the narrator’s place in history as a relic of the past is shown in the description of his time in the war. He recalls his position in training new soldiers in both the ways of horsemanship and tanks. This reflects his position at the crossroads between the past and the future, and just how fast technological developments have been in his lifetime. In the span of a few years, warfare changed from men on horseback to the most advanced instruments of death known to humans at that point.
At first, the narrator accepts the new changes, and is even excited by the thought of new technology. However, as the machines of war continue to become more and more advanced, the narrator finds himself becoming increasingly disgusted by them. He laments the shift in warfare from honorable battles involving skilled professionals such as himself to a dehumanizing event of mass death made easy with the advent of new technology. On page 68, he says: “The old Centaurs were overpowered by the new Titan.” Technology as a whole had become this monstrous thing, greater than the humans that use it. The old ways were no match for this new beast, as seen in the narrator’s recounting of a story from the war. While he was still in the cavalry, he was shot off his horse by a young soldier with a machine gun. In this story, the narrator’s professional skill was no match for a scared enemy firing near-blindly with a machine gun. This encounter signifies the death of the old world; now violence, alongside all other aspects of the human, has become “mass-produced” and simplified by technology. Instead of putting in years of training in combat, now any kid off the street could pick up a gun and do work only done by the most feared warriors only a few centuries before the events of the story. This reflects the broader change in society depicted in the novel, with the automatons becoming essential to everyday life, and ingrained completely in society’s Zeitgeist. Humans are becoming completely reliant on machines, to the point of becoming machine-like themselves. This speculation in the novel was scarily prescient, with modern humans being almost entirely enveloped in technology in their day to day lives. Gone are the days that the narrator so fondly remembers, which existed in our world too. Now is the time of an impersonal world of technological overload, just as in the world of The Glass Bees.