Literary Criticism Of The Invisible Man

Omar Salih

Mr.Oravec

English 11

27 February 2014

Literary Analysis of the Invisible Man

“The stranger came in early February, one wintry, though a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried” (Wells 1).

The Invisible Man is a fiction novel written by H.G. Wells. The theme is how a scientist, the invisible man, later known as Griffin, the protagonist, used his physics skills in developing a new potion to make any living creature invisible to receive recognition and power from the world. The narrator, telling the story with no judgment or comments on the characters or events, used an objectively point of view throughout the novel. The invisible man initiates his expedition in Iping, England during the cold month of February (this town being an example of allusion) covered head to toe in bandages. He is known as “the stranger” throughout much of the novel, keeping his identity unknown by all of the community. Soon enough, he becomes the talk of the town and this adds numerous complications to his plans.

“But whatever they thought of him, people in Iping, on a whole agreed in disliking him. His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to and urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers” (25). Griffin liked to be alone at all times and his anti-social behavior later causes his downfall. It seems as if everywhere he ...

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...on, Griffin is found lying on the cement dead and now completely visible, the townspeople startled and in complete awe. Dr. Kemp is known as a hero to the people and the story of the invisible man becomes renowned.

Griffin was a man who had many problems physically, mentally and emotionally thus in the end making himself his own undoing. Despite the terrible tragedy that happened to him in the ending, it was for the best, for the townspeople in Iping and the country England as a whole. Each literary device used in The Invisible man was used to develop the main theme in the novel. “Surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken, and wounded, betrayed, and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physician the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career” (167).