Which characters have realistic reactions to the Invisible Man? Which ones have unrealistic reactions?
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In sharp contrast to Smith, Wells was a socialist. Indeed, he was a principal force in shaping the course that socialist theory and practice took in twentieth century Britain; he is generally regarded as one of the architects of the modern welfare state. It should come as no surprise, then, that Wells uses his parable of the Invisible Man to call Smith's economic theories into question, presenting Griffin as a monster of egoism and finding chaos and catastrophe where Smith had seen order and progress. Thus, The Invisible Man offers an opportunity to examine Wells's critique of capitalism, both the substance of his arguments and the motives behind his hostility to the free market. In particular, we will see that Wells had special reasons as a creative writer for criticizing the impersonality of the market economy and its invisible ordering forces.
II.
The key to understanding The Invisible Man is the dual setting of the story. The novel largely takes place in the rural village of Iping and other rustic parts of England. But in Griffin's flashback narrative of how he became invisible, the scene shifts to the urban metropolis of London. The Invisible Man turns on the contrast between life in a small village and life in a big city. In fact, despite all the novelty of its science-fiction premise, The Invisible Man explores territory already quite familiar in nineteenth-century British literature, from William Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy. Like a Romantic poet or a Victorian novelist, Wells juxtaposes the tradition-bound, community-oriented existence of a rural village with the anomie and rootless cosmopolitanism of a modern metropolis. In moving from London to a country village, Griffin creates the dramatic tension in the story, a confrontation between antithetical ways of life.
As Wells describes Griffin's situation: "His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers."5 Wells portrays Iping as a tightknit community: everybody knows everybody else, and indeed everybody minds everybody else's business. The citizens of Iping are close minded and superstitious, easily upset by anything that might disturb the regularity of their existence. In the opening pages of the novel, Griffin arrives in Iping as the quintessential stranger, unknown to anyone in the village and visibly alien by virtue of his grotesque appearance in a disguise calculated to conceal his invisibility (one of the locals even speculates that Griffin may be racially distinct from the townsfolk).
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II.
The key to understanding The Invisible Man is the dual setting of the story. The novel largely takes place in the rural village of Iping and other rustic parts of England. But in Griffin's flashback narrative of how he became invisible, the scene shifts to the urban metropolis of London. The Invisible Man turns on the contrast between life in a small village and life in a big city. In fact, despite all the novelty of its science-fiction premise, The Invisible Man explores territory already quite familiar in nineteenth-century British literature, from William Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy. Like a Romantic poet or a Victorian novelist, Wells juxtaposes the tradition-bound, community-oriented existence of a rural village with the anomie and rootless cosmopolitanism of a modern metropolis. In moving from London to a country village, Griffin creates the dramatic tension in the story, a confrontation between antithetical ways of life.
As Wells describes Griffin's situation: "His irritability, though it might have been comprehensible to an urban brain-worker, was an amazing thing to these quiet Sussex villagers."5 Wells portrays Iping as a tightknit community: everybody knows everybody else, and indeed everybody minds everybody else's business. The citizens of Iping are close minded and superstitious, easily upset by anything that might disturb the regularity of their existence. In the opening pages of the novel, Griffin arrives in Iping as the quintessential stranger, unknown to anyone in the village and visibly alien by virtue of his grotesque appearance in a disguise calculated to conceal his invisibility (one of the locals even speculates that Griffin may be racially distinct from the townsfolk).
is this is what u want
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