The Invisible Man Analysis

Literary Devices in The Invisible Man

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Setting

Where does The Invisible Man take place? Let's see: in Iping at the Coach and Horses Inn; in London at the boardinghouse on Great Portland Street and the costume shop in Drury Lane; in Burdock at t...

Narrator Point of View

Objective: Just the Facts, Ma'am In addition to fiction, Wells also wrote science textbooks and articles (and a lot of other nonfiction books), all genres where the writer needs to be pretty object...

Genre

Science Fiction FTWA man uses science to do something that humans can't yet do with science. Doesn't get more science fiction than that. (Although we have to admit, we're getting kind of close to t...

Tone

Just the FactsIn our section on "Narrative Technique," we discussed how Wells' narrator often takes an objective point of view on the story – just the facts. This definitely creates a detached, a...

Writing Style

Yeah, we said it: Wells' writing style is realistic. How about the whole invisible man thing? you might ask. And the fact that Griffin just happens to run into an old college acquaintance by accide...

What's Up With the Title?

Wells doesn't try to make things hard for his readers. If the most important thing in a story is a time machine, he'll call that book The Time Machine. If there's a war between two worlds, he'll ca...

What's Up With the Ending?

Just to recap: at the end of the story, the Invisible Man is beaten and kicked to death by a crowd and Marvel escapes with all of the Invisible Man's stolen money and scientific notes. So what do y...

Tough-o-Meter

When we read The Invisible Man, we have to remember that Wells was writing for a different audience: British people in the 1890s. Sure, we can always just use Google to find out stuff we don't alre...

Plot Analysis

Stranger in a Strange Land The novel opens when a stranger arrives at Iping and no one knows what to make of him. From the very beginning we know that there's some weirdness here, but we're not q...

Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis

The Invisible Man can be considered a tragedy, but it fits much more snugly into that plot if you put the story in chronological order. So we'll start with the Invisible Man's own story that he t...

Three-Act Plot Analysis

In Act I, we are introduced to the Invisible Man and his strange behaviors. We also get to see how other people react to him (not well). Once the Invisible Man reveals himself as an Invisible Man,...

Trivia

Some critics think that The Invisible Man was influenced by comic writer W. S. Gilbert's poem "The Perils of Invisibility" (1870). What do you think? Just like Griffin, Wells was kind of a disgrunt...

Steaminess Rating

We don't want to know what you would do with invisibility, but this Invisible Man does nothing steamy.

Allusions

Bramblehurst (1.1) is a fictional town, possibly based on Midhurst in west Sussex (where Wells worked as a teacher).Iping (1.2) is a real village a few miles northwest of Midhurst.Great Portland St...