Consequently, for Thoreau, these people have no more worth than 'horses and dogs.' Real heroes, then, are those who 'serve the state with their consciences.' Ellison draws on Thoreau's image of 'wooden men' who 'can perhaps be manufactured' in his description of shift workers heading for their jobs: 'With practiced motion and an absolute conservation of movement, they sidestepped up onto the slow-strip and (in a chorus line reminiscent of a Busby Berkeley film of the antediluvian 1930s) advanced across. He exploded in his living room, in his favorite chair, apoplectic over the absolute garbage fire. 1 'Repent, Harlequin' locates in the future our present world having gone mad with militarized labor forces, preoccupation with. Michael Straczynski the Film Rights to Repent, Harlequin Said the Ticktockman. Harlan Ellison's ''Repent, Harlequin' Said the Ticktockman,' first published in 1965, is a purposefully extrapolative story about social regimentation. Thoreau argues that most people serve the state without thinking and without moral reflection. Ellison's Harlequin: Irrational Moral Action in Static Time. Repent, Harlequin Said the Ticktockman: The Classic Story Ellison, Harlan, Berry, Rick, Berry, Rick on. His opening quotation from Thoreau makes this clear. In ''Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman,' Ellison clearly sets his hero, the Harlequin, in opposition to both the totalitarian regime of the Ticktockman and the master schedule and to the masses of people who choose to conform to the strictures of the society.

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