Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

turned lower-class Londoners into picturesque types.
    We see the effect of so much writing experience the moment we open The Invisible Man. Mrs. Hall, the landlady of the Coach and Horses Inn in Iping, where Griffin, the Invisible Man, sets up his makeshift laboratory, comes alive as a human presence when she muses on her nephew’s accident:
    There was my sister’s son, Tom, jest cut his arm with a scythe, tumbled on it in the ‘ayfield, and bless me! he was three months tied up, sir. You’d hardly believe it. It’s regular given me a dread of a scythe, sir (p.95).
    Mrs. Hall’s comic fretting is only marginally related to the story of the Invisible Man, but her language in its sheer ordinariness renders the fiction much more terrifying. That is, we have the linguistic reality of late-nineteenth-century London invaded by the bizarre: The real world is now Wells’s setting, and he invades it with all the violence of the Martians in The War of the Worlds, which he would publish in 1898. This is one of Wells’s most important innovations: The reader need not be transported to the future or to Dr. Moreau’s island laboratory, where evolution is accelerated by science. Now the fantastic strides through the front door of the reader’s house in the form of the Invisible Man.
    This technique of making the real world strange also reappears in Wells’s narrator. Unlike Hillyer, the witness-narrator in The Time Machine, the narrator here shifts ambiguously from being an omniscient third-person narrator in true novelistic style to being a reporter. For example, chapter XI (p.136) begins in an explanatory mode: “Now in order clearly to understand what had happened in the inn, it is necessary to go back to the moment when Mr. Marvel first came into view of Mr. Huxter’s window.” The narrator here is in full command of the facts and uses his knowledge to inform the reader. At other times, the narrator leaves much to our imagination:
    The Invisible Man seems to have rushed out of Kemp’s house in a state of blind fury. A little child playing near Kemp’s gateway was violently caught up and thrown aside, so that its ankle was broken, and thereafter for some hours the Invisible Man passed out of human perceptions. No one knows where he went nor what he did. But one can imagine him.... (opening of chapter XXVI, p. 207).
    This change of focus reflects the reader’s changing perception of the Invisible Man. We are simultaneously sympathetic to his situation and horrified at the way he can sacrifice a cat (p. 176) to science with no thought of its suffering or steal money entrusted to his father, thus forcing the old man to commit suicide (p. 173). The rambling autobiographical sketch he gives to Kemp (chapters XVII—XXIV) shows him to be more brilliant than the unimaginative Kemp but also unscrupulous, egotistical, and, finally, tyrannical. Mad, either from ingesting chemicals or from the sense of power invisibility confers, Griffin has, as Kemp says, “cut himself off from his kind” (p. 209). He becomes a superman but one who seeks to bend society to his will.
    The ending of The Invisible Man is charged with pathos. Surrounded, he is kicked to death (pp. 222-223) by workmen who are afraid and as indifferent to the marvelous fact of Griffin’s invisibility as the Eloi are to the presence of the Time Traveller. He even begs for mercy, something he himself is incapable of bestowing. But here Wells, just as he did in The Time Machine, when the Time Traveller disappears perhaps to return at another time, leaves a thread behind: The Invisible Man’s diaries, useless in the ignorant hands of the drunken Mr. Marvel, may fall into the hands of another scientist, one who may use invisibility as a means to change the world.
    Alfred Mac Adam, a professor at Barnard College—Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984