What ‘The Invisible Man’ Made Visible to Me
A Working Scientist Grapples with How Character Impacts Her Profession
On a dark and snowy night, a stranger walks into the small town of Iping. He rents a room at the Coach and Horses, promptly fills it with flasks, books, and scribblings, and firmly shuts the curtains. He asks to be left alone and brusquely dismisses any attempt at small talk. Most mysteriously, his features are always wrapped in bandages and his eyes obscured by dark glasses.
While a bit unnatural, all this is well and good until the stranger’s rent stretches overdue. Then, the owner Mrs. Hall just must have a word with him. Her resolve turns to horror when the stranger boldly unwraps his face before her. Chaos ensues as he takes to the street, fleeing naked—and completely invisible.
What Character Does with Power
In a quest to get his notes and books back, the stranger attempts to commandeer a hapless, lone traveler as an accomplice, then an old schoolmate. Meanwhile, newspaper reports from Iping spread like wildfire, making it progressively harder for him to operate. As the noose tightens, his reign of terror grows.
H.G. Wells published The Invisible Man in 1897, one of the forty-plus books he released during his prolific career. Broadly considered one of the founding fathers of science fiction, Wells gave us such stories as “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine” at a time when imaginative literature was rare.
“While his contemporaries were experimenting with modernism and sought to portray the modern world in intricate detail and reality,” says the introduction to the Arcturus edition of The Invisible Man, “Wells instead unlocked his boundless imagination and created new worlds for readers to explore.” In The Invisible Man, that imagination is on full display as he weaves together thrilling new scientific theory with smart, often hilarious depictions of small-town life to create a perfectly packaged sci-fi adventure.
At first glance, I expected The Invisible Man to be about whether the power of invisibility would drive a man to corruption. Similar thought experiments have entertained the imaginations of philosophers as far back as Plato. Surely, anyone who found themselves conveniently (inconveniently?) invisible to shopkeepers and with expensive experiments to fund might want (need?) to resort to stealing to stay alive, right?
Indeed, the Arcturus introduction seems to agree: “Wells’ novel explores the question of morality when man is free to do as he pleases without the risk of being caught.” But what I actually found proved far more terrifying.
As I read, the stranger slowly revealed—first through his actions and then in his monologue to his old schoolmate, Dr. Kemp—that he had always been self-absorbed, arrogant, and cold, even before he became invisible. It dawned on me that Wells was not primarily interested in what power does to character, but what character does with power.
Godlike Powers in Sinister Hands
Wells’s point in The Invisible Man is that when that character is flawed, the results can be absolutely horrifying: The stranger (named Griffin, I eventually learned) may not have started with the intent to harm anyone. But there’s something amiss in his makeup and the more desperate he becomes, the more controlling and violent he behaves.
When the invisible Griffin tries to convince the hapless traveler, Mr. Marvel, to help him, he begins with rational arguments. But upon finding him reluctant, Griffin quickly decides that cruelly pelting him into submission with rocks is more expedient.
“I’ve chosen you,” said the voice [to Marvel]. “You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such as a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power. But if you betray me,” he said, “if you fail to do as I direct you—” He paused and tapped Mr. Marvel’s shoulder smartly. Mr. Marvel gave a yelp of terror at the touch.
A few chapters later, we find Marvel sprinting towards a nearby town in pure desperation, his shoulder covered with bruises. He throws himself through the nearest door and bawls, “Coming! The ’Visible Man! After me! For Gawd’s sake! ’Elp! ’Elp! ’Elp!”
How quickly fear spreads when godlike powers fall into sinister hands. For how do you stop an invisible man? At any moment, he may be watching you; indeed, within a very hair’s breadth of wrapping his hands around your throat. Any open door he may slip through, any unguarded corner crouch behind. The 2020 Invisible Man film adaptation was classified as horror, not sci-fi, for a reason.
And then presently . . . something—a wind—a pad, pad, pad,—a sound like a panting breathing, rushed by.
People screamed. People sprang off the pavement. . . . They were shouting in the street before Marvel was halfway there. They were bolting the houses and slamming the doors behind them, with the news. . . . Fear came striding by, rushed ahead of him, and in a moment had seized the town.
When science advances, we often focus on the cool technology and view it as stimulating various actions and responses. We would, however, do well to remember that the outcome of a new discovery depends less on the power itself and more on the character of those who wield it.
As a society, we know there is connection between character and power every time we look at each other with wide eyes and say, “If this were to fall into the wrong hands. . . .” Today, movies and TV abound with explorations of this question from different angles. See, for instance, almost any superhero franchise or sci-fi series.
Most keep power in the hands of honest citizens and thwart those who would misuse it. But some, such as The Boys and Black Mirror, remind us that power does not always fall to the perfect. When we allow fiction like The Invisible Man to explore the outcomes of scientific advances before they happen, we are reminded to tread carefully.
The Griffin in Me
Because I will likely never possess godlike power I considered myself safe from comparison to Griffin. Instead, I was surprised to find flashes of similarity between his personality and my own in his attitude towards people.
In Griffin’s view, people are always in his way, less intelligent than he, and generally frustrating. As Wells puts it, “He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity.” His impatience proved . . . uncomfortably familiar. As someone who tends to work fast, think fast, and move fast, I sympathized with his frustration over a slow clock-repairer at the inn:
“Why don’t you finish and go?” said the rigid figure, evidently in a state of painfully suppressed rage. “All you’ve got to do is fix the hour-hand on its axle. You’re simply humbugging—”
Occasional irritation is one thing, but Wells shows us where all this leads. Griffin’s opinions are so successful at isolating him that he has no friends to speak of and no living family. Thus, when he needs help, the only way he can think to get it is through coercion.
One could chalk up his supposed superiority to the fact that he is an academic, whereas the rest of the characters are primarily undereducated townsfolk. However, Dr. Kemp provides an interesting contrast. He is similarly well-learned, but he holds a different opinion about people.
Upon seeing Marvel running from his window, Kemp first dismisses him as, “another of those fools, like that ass who ran into me this morning round a corner, with his ’’Visible man a-coming, sir!’ One might think we were in the thirteenth century.” But upon meeting the invisible man himself, he spends a sleepless night thinking furiously. By daybreak he settles on his course of action: He writes a letter to Colonel Adye, head of the town’s police. Notably, Adye responds.
Meanwhile, Kemp and Griffin have a conversation that puts their worldviews in sharp contrast. Griffin explains that while trying to invisibly steal a costume nose for himself, he grew so frustrated with the shopkeeper’s acute hearing that he knocked him out, gagged him, and tied him up in a sack. When Kemp, shocked, faults him for this approach, Griffin replies,
“Confound it! You’ll call me a thief next! Surely, Kemp, you’re not fool enough to dance on the old strings. Can’t you see my position?”
“And his too,” said Kemp.
The Invisible Man stood up sharply. “What do you mean to say?”
Kemp’s face grew a trifle hard. He was about to speak and checked himself. “I suppose, after all,” he said with a sudden change of manner, “the thing had to be done. You were in a fix. But still—”
“Of course I was in a fix—an infernal fix. And he made me wild too—hunting me about the house, fooling about with his revolver, locking and unlocking doors. He was simply exasperating. You don’t blame me, do you? You don’t blame me?”
It is at this moment that Kemp confirms beyond a doubt that Griffin is both completely devoid of empathy and chillingly unaware of the deficit. Shortly thereafter, Griffin bolts, Adye arrives, and Kemp and Adye strategize about what to do.
For scientists, Griffin is a foil to Kemp. When faced with a problem, Kemp offers the opposite reaction to Griffin. He chooses to reach out for help instead of assuming “only I am smart enough to solve this problem; others will simply make it worse.”
The fact that Colonel Adye responds with partnership indicates that Kemp has not isolated himself as a scientist; he has built trusting relationships. The strength of community as opposed to a solitary actor with power becomes the drama that drives the final scenes of the book.
Returning to Griffin and his complaint against the world, Wells uses him to voice a feeling that is not unfamiliar to many of us, I would expect. “By Heaven, Kemp,” he says,
you don’t know what rage is! To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.
“Why couldn’t they leave me alone?” he wails. How I can relate to this!
Under My Skin
There are so many times when I have thought, “If only there weren’t people in my way, then I could do x, y, or z.” Just last month at work, I was part of a project where the steps looked wonderful on paper—oh, the process was beautiful—but then nothing went according to plan. I came home muttering, “When real people get involved, everything gums up.” I am ashamed to admit that I wasn’t really joking.
When I am truly honest with myself, my response to people often leans more towards Griffin than Kemp. Through The Invisible Man, Wells revealed to me, in scary detail, where that leaning will take me if I let it.
The sober reality is that the road is shorter than I think from complaining about how many problems people make in life, to trying to ignore and work around them, to then just forcing them to my will. The moment I start seeing people as obstacles to be overcome instead of partners to be valued? That’s the moment I, like Griffin, will have truly lost my way.
As a scientist who is looking for new discoveries every day, I found The Invisible Man wriggled under my skin in a way not many other sci-fi and fantasy books ever have. Wells’s writing does what many have argued serves as one of the key benefits of literature: using the imagination to experience situations unlike our own so we can learn their lessons without having to live them ourselves.
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Thanks for an insightful review and a hearty dose of honest self-examination. The latter made me think about how I’ve become more critical of others as I’ve aged and less patient. I recall one piece of advice an older friend gave me years ago: wear life like a loose shirt. That doesn’t make sense to some people, but it always has to me.
The invisible man reflects the fallen nature of mankind, which is one reason that we might not want AI to replicate humans TOO closely…