The War of the Worlds Community Quotes

This scene is pretty small and might seem unimportant compared to what transpires after (Heat-Ray!), but there's something quietly communal about it. All the humans have freaked out a little over how strange the Martians are, and what do you do when something new and weird comes in to your life? Well, when it's the narrator, he finds something old and familiar – one of his neighbors – and they just stand around quietly. Even that little moment is about a sense of community.

Here we have a glimpse of what's going to come in the future. All the community's ideals will go out the window (and you have to imagine it's kind of a high window, because these ideals will not survive the landing). Rather than protect the women and children, which is what the community would probably want to do, the crowd will kill them. You could argue that this book contrasts the community (as a group of people with some higher ideals and a sense of their own individuality) with the crowd (as a group of people without individuality and without higher ideals).

We get only a few glimpses of the community before the Martians start to mess things up, and they're such small and uneventful moments that we might easily miss them. This one always warms our hearts (or makes us hungry for strawberries). Two neighbors talk about the neighborhood and one gives the other something grown in a garden. It's a very normal scene, which is why we're so interested in it. It shows us what the community was like before the Martians showed up.

And then, just seven chapters later, we see what has become of the community. Instead of offering each other strawberries, these neighbors are attacking each other. Now that's a turnaround. Rather than the Martian invasion making people band together and build up a sense of community, we see the breakdown of the old community.

Here, the brother and the Elphinstone ladies are caught up in the "exodus" from London. The chapter title, "Exodus," might be a little ironic. After all, in the Biblical book of Exodus, the exodus from Egypt is like a Biblical version of a team-building exercise. All the tribes come together to get out of there. But here, the exodus from London is like a negative version of that. Instead of building the team out of individuals, these people are disappearing in the crush. (And for some, that's literal, as they get trampled.) What sense of community can be built in such a situation?

When the brother is (temporarily) swallowed up by the crowd, we probably feel even more the danger of this sort of crowd. That is, we've followed the narrator's brother now for two chapters, and gosh darn it, we like him. He's vaguely heroic and pretty clever. And what happens to him? The same thing that happens to everyone else: he loses some of his individuality in the crowd.

Once again, we see the ideals of the community destroyed by the coming of the Martians. That is, when someone is drowning, people with boats are supposed to help them. Whereas here, it's the people in the boats who are somewhat responsible for the drowning.

So far in these quotes we've gotten a lot of examples of community-breakdown. With the narrator and the curate, though, we have an example of a temporary community during the Martian invasion. Generally speaking, it's not a pretty picture. Instead of, say, one member giving the other member strawberries (see above), we get a lot of fighting and withholding of food. But there is one bright point to this community: according to the narrator, he has to be even better (saner) because the curate is so far gone. That's kind of a weird positive, but we'll take what we can get.

What about inter-species – or inter-world – communities? Here, at the end of the novel, we briefly glimpse a human-Martian community. Is this a real community?

This is an idea that is repeated a lot in science fiction: if aliens attacked, all of Earth would be united. Putting aside whether that's actually what would happen, we can see how sharing some life-altering experience might help form a sense of community. But is that what the rest of the book has shown us? When England was attacked, the English didn't get a new conception of their commonweal, did they? They beat and stabbed each other in order to get away from the Martians. So why does the book end with this hope for a sense of community if the rest of the book hasn't given us much reason to be optimistic?