The War of the Worlds Foolishness and Folly Quotes

Folly in The War of the Worlds isn't just people acting stupidly for no reason. People usually have reasons for why they're acting foolishly. (Bad reasons, of course, but still reasons.) One of the bad reasons people have in this book is their pride and complacency. They think things will continue along as they have been, with them in charge. Wells' narrator will hit this note again and again.

The War of the Worlds is an old book, so you might've known the plot before you read it. Heck, even from the title you should at least know that there's going to be a war. That's why it's easy for us to treat this like a horror movie, yelling to the characters, "No, stupid, don't go check out the weird noises you've heard upstairs, that's a serial killer!" The narrator makes it easy for us to do this by pointing out a bunch of things that humans didn't figure out in time. For instance, humans saw that Mars changed, but they never realized what those changes meant. You might read that and say, "Oh, you're so stupid." But what about the point about Mars as the planet of war? Should that have been a clue to us? Should we take all mythology seriously?

Is this folly here? This passage certainly connects with the complacency angle that the narrator has been noting. (Let's be honest: he's nagging us about this.) But as the narrator points out, no one dreamed of the Martians invading. Was it foolish of humans not to dream of it? Should people go out and prepare for every single crazy event that could happen? Or would that just be another type of foolishness?

Once again, the narrator is harping on his point about human complacency. When huge changes were about to take place, people kept doing everyday little things, like learning to ride a bike. The narrator seems to judge people pretty hard here, but what should they have done? How can anyone prepare for the unthinkable?

We could think of the first contact with the Martian cylinder as expressing the foolish complacency that the narrator mentions. For instance, when people first see the cylinder, they don't understand how important it is. What people would rather see is something exciting and new, but still within the realm of their experience. (For instance, while they don't want to see a Martian cylinder – which they can't understand – they might be more curious to see something like a railroad accident.)

The narrator beats himself up (and other humans) a lot over not realizing things in the moment. Here, the narrator says that he overlooked some issues that were "obvious." But, since everyone overlooked these issues, are they really all that "obvious"?

Is the narrator being fair here? Since he's looking back on his experiences in the Martian invasion, he can pick apart all his mistakes. (And they are mistakes.) But how can you avoid these sorts of flub-ups? It's interesting because, when you do science, you make mistakes. That's part of perfecting science. It's trial-and-error, right? Not trial-and-immediate-success. Yet, the mistakes people make in this novel don't lead to better knowledge. For instance, the narrator realizes he was as dumb as a dodo. How does realizing that help him avoid the same mistake?

The narrator often criticizes foolishness, but in this passage he gives a more concrete identification of the problem. It's not just that Londoners are naturally complacent ("The habit of personal security"), but that the newspapers so often cry wolf ("startling intelligence so much a matter of course"). The newspapers raise alarms so often because they sell more papers that way. Basically, the narrator is saying that people are foolishly complacent because the newspapers so often make a big noise about nothing much.

The narrator (and the other people in this book) might be pretty foolish at times, but we see why they're being foolish and we sympathize. The narrator, on the other hand, is awfully tough on people. That's why it's a bit surprising when he lets himself off the hook for being taken in by the artilleryman's terrible ideas. Why does the narrator let himself off the hook about this foolishness anyway?