The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

Rating: 5/5, excellent

WARNING: This review contains spoilers!

This book is a touchstone for me. I read it the first time in middle school, and it really resonated with me. The Invisible Man is a very irritable, impatient, smart person. He reminds me a lot of myself and my father as well.

I feel like I’ve gotten a lot more patient and more interested in people over the years, but when I first came to this novel, I felt like the Invisible Man was the only person (real or fictional) who could really understand me. I was always more interested in reading than talking to people, so I related well to a character who wanted to be left alone to bury himself in his studies while everyone around him is trying to hassle him to participate.

The Invisible Man contains comedy, tragedy, action, and science fiction, but at an emotional level it’s about alienation. Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, is alienated to the extreme. He doesn’t have meaningful connections with anyone, instead focusing all his time and energy on his experiments.

He’s also quite sociopathic: he steals money from his father to fund his experiments, but the money was borrowed from someone else. The loss of this money causes the Invisible Man’s father to kill himself.

Take a look at the funeral scene. Notice how well H.G. Wells captures Griffin’s pervasive sense of alienation:

“I had left the Chestilstowe cottage already,” he said, “when that happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money; the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a thicket, and suddenly coming on some unmeaning tragedy. I went to bury him. My mind was still on this research, and I did not lift a finger to save his character. I remember the funeral, the cheap hearse, the scant ceremony, the windy frost-bitten hillside, and the old college friend of his who read the service over him—a shabby, black, bent old man with a sniveling cold.

“I remember walking back to the empty home, through the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town. Every way the roads ran out at last into the desecrated fields and ended in rubble heaps and rank wet weeds. I remember myself a gaunt black figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place.

“I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant required my attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair.

“But going along the High Street, my old life came back to me for a space, for I met the girl I had known ten years since. Our eyes met.

“Something moved me to turn back and talk to her. She was a very ordinary person.

“It was all like a dream, that visit to the old places. I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved.”

I’ve always related strongly to this scene, although I have more distance from Griffin as a character as I get older. When I was younger, I thought he was really cool, but now I see him as more of a cautionary tale. The idea isn’t to idolize stoicism, but to warn readers about the dangers of becoming cut off from society (or excluding others from society).

It’s hard to say if the Invisible Man is autistic, sociopathic, introverted, obsessive, psychotic, or maybe all of the above. It’s also hard to say whether his problems are caused by personality, early experiences, physical deformities, family relationships, drug use, academic/job stress, poverty, etc, because they’re all present in his life. Wells shows that mental illness is complicated; the symptoms often resist neat categorization and the causes can come from body or mind or environment.

I also like how H.G. Wells shows social isolation as both cause and effect of mental illness. Griffin is mentally ill because he’s isolated and isolated because he’s mentally ill. It’s a vicious cycle.

In The Invisible Man, it’s not just Griffin isolating himself but everybody else treating him as different or weird that causes him to be alone. Everybody either walks on eggshells around him or pries deeply into his personal business. I feel like this is a problem people who are visibly different in some way have with socializing: other people either ask rude personal questions or are really awkward and careful to never let it come up.

Griffin’s interactions with other people are short and shallow, which causes him to believe other people are boring. This is the classic intellectual’s problem of specialized interests making it hard to make small talk (Susan Cain has a lot about this in her book, Quiet).

When I re-read this book last year (this review’s been a long time coming), I had in the back of my mind Rebecca Solnit’s idea of fantasy literature that sequesters the reader in “The Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me”. Griffin is an white man, so I was wondering if my favorite book from adolescence might be a “failure of empathy” as she described Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I feel a lot of empathy for the protagonist, but I’m also white (though not male, but definitely conditioned to empathize with men) so empathizing with a character like Griffin isn’t too much of a stretch for me.

There’s also the fact that the Invisible Man is quite solipsistic. He’s not a character that has empathy for anyone or would even see the value in empathy. On a simple level, it does work as a male fantasy. Through Griffin, the reader vicariously acts on violent impulses with no consequences. Though Wells doesn’t portray Griffin’s violence in a positive light, he makes his actions understandable which invites us to empathize with him. Through the beauty of H.G. Wells’s prose Griffin is elevated to heroic status (if a tragic hero).

On the other hand, The Invisible Man also works as a female-gaze caretaking fantasy, because when you’re reading this you just want to cuddle Griffin and make it all better (or at least I do). Griffin fits that tall, dark, and snarky archetype that we see in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and that supernatural lover sweet spot that made Twilight so popular. It works as a gendered fantasy, but for either gender.

I’m not in a position to say whether it’s a white-specific fantasy, but there’s evidence both for and against that. Griffin is coded as both black and white at different times in the narrative. He compares himself to a (n-word) when he’s describing how hard he worked on his research. In another scene, a villager wonders whether Griffin might be piebald because the color of his nose is white and his leg is black. There’s also the old term “griffe” which means someone who is mixed race, mostly black with some white, and I’m not sure, but his name might be a play on that.

However, Griffin is albino. This doesn’t preclude him being African, but he’s probably white based on that statement comparing himself to a black person. Griffin’s struggle may be interpreted as a metaphor for that of black people, but I think it’s more likely that H.G. Wells is comparing Griffin’s social status to that of black people to show how much of an outsider he is. If that’s the case, Ralph Ellison flipped Wells’s metaphor in his novel of the same name, The Invisible Man (1952) by using an invisible man as a metaphor for the plight of black people.

I know classic literature gets a lot of flak for claiming to be “universal” while really only showing a white-male perspective, but I think that sometimes analyzing literature strictly from a social justice perspective can miss the point. Even though Griffin is a white male, I think The Invisible Man isn’t a specifically white-male fantasy but one that appeals to everyone who’s ever felt different or alienated.

Still, I have some questions in my mind about whether The Invisible Man‘s kind of self-insertable self-aggrandizing violent power fantasy is a good or a bad thing. It’s comforting, but I think works that exalt the power of the individual like this predispose people to seek fame and become more narcissistic instead of doing boring important work that will make a difference in people’s lives. It’s good to be comfortable with yourself and know how to spend time alone, but it’s not good to close yourself off with your interests and think you don’t need anyone or anything else.

I guess part of growing up is learning how to differentiate fantasy from reality.