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War of The Worlds
partner and they never communicated again. Wells expressed the loss of friendship in War of the Worlds when the narrator kills a friend he met on his way to London. The man became so frightful he began to scream, which drew the aliens’ attention to them. After he killed the man with a butcher knife, he then hid him in a cellar.
“ T.H Huxley taught Wells about social evolution which was the single most important and influential aspect of his education.” (Literary Criticism 418) Throughout Wells’ life, he learned things from people that would change his view on the world and the future. Many events during his lifetime also encouraged him to write novels with pessimistic views in them. “ The War of the Worlds shows the destructive advance of the technologically advanced Martians which compares to the British successes over the poorly armed Tasmanian Islanders.” (Literary Criticism 419) Many people that idolized H.G Wells felt that after he was dead, there would be no one to investigate the unexplored domains of science fiction. “ His pessimism was due to the fact that he felt like after he died that people would not be open to the extra-ordinary and would close themselves off from the possibilities of things such as extra-terrestrial life.” (123 student) War of the Worlds was a book based on man’s own stupidity and how that would be his downfall. In the book, humans ignore the other planets and become so self absorbed that they hardly recognize a Martian pod that landed on Earth. Wells realized that many authors were afraid to touch on things that people could not understand, so, “ Wells wrote about what the world was afraid to touch on.” (123 student) “ His early writings reflect a pessimistic, apocalyptic vision of the future.” (Literary Criticism 419) This was due to his rough childhood and bad relationships. After his works became successful his view changed completely. “ His later works show the possibility of mankind and his potential.” (Literary Criticism 418) Wells felt that the end of the world would be due to man’s ignorance of nature and the future. He expresses both of these fates in War of the Worlds. Martians, which represent the future, are destroying the humans. The Martians are destroyed by bacteria, which represent nature.
“ His last few years were spent trying to defeat the forces that were leading mankind to its own destruction.”(Britannica) In War of the Worlds, the narrator spends what he thinks are his last few days making a plan to stop the Martians and continue the human race by living underground. “ In 1934 he had discussions with both Stalin and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them to his world-saving scheme.”(H.G Wells) The narrator in the novel attempts to recruit a gunman from the British army to help him in his underground scheme or the “ world-saving scheme”. Many things in his book are similar to things that actually happened or happen later [next page]