H. G. Wells tells a story of a man who has nothing for human eyes. Here ’Nothing’ has all the qualities of matter or let me say ’man’. Because here this ’Nothing’ is man himself. A man using science as a catalyst trying to rise above his fellow beings, falling flat on his own face and then struggling to live life as a normal human being and when turned down making the most of his present state to create havoc among the normal human beings.
The book starts at Iping in the dead chill of English Winter. We meet a stranger dressed or let us say covered from head to toe, while his face lies masked below mysterious bandages. When asked about his bandages, he promptly answers about some accident he had. All goes well for him until one fine day on being spied by the inn’s owners Mr. & Mrs. Hall, he undoes his bandages to show the ’nothing’ he had been hiding from the people surrounding him. The town is on fire with the confusing news of this mysterious stranger. Now he has no other way but to flee from Iping, after creating an episode of horror in lives of the villagers of Iping.
Grifin, the invisible man comes to light at a slow pace, rapidly building the mystery of the character. He works towards making his childhood dream come true.
Q. Who doesn’t dream to be invisible?
Ans Well, everyone does. Grifin does the same, but then he commits a mistake. He converts his dreams to reality with the help of his scientific knowledge and skills. But as soon as his dreams take to reality, life turns out to be a nightmare, with no way back to his natural past.
Grifin makes himself invisible, just coz he fantasises to be invisible. He dreams that invisibility will be his greatest power, with which he can do whatever he can’t do as a visible person. But soon he realises that his invisibility has nothing to do with what he wears or eats or drinks. In his outfits, he has to cover all the invisible parts of his body including his head as people cannot accept a normal person without a head. And if he wants to be invisible, he has to rome around naked. And walking naked in an English winter adds more to his pain. Grifin is more like a spider caught in it’s own web. His failure to invent a chemical which can bring him back to visibility makes him face a storm of frustration. To add to this his attempts to make people accept him as a normal human being fall flat. In his frustration due to denial of acceptance by the society, he walks his own way of terrorising the human beings and thus meets with the last page of his book.
H. G. Wells shows what science can do to us, if used in wrong directions. Using science as his base, Grifin stands on it and tries to defy nature, but much to his horror the nature defies him, while science takes itself away from beneath his feet. H. G. Wells uses his skills on words with vigour. The simplicity of his writing adds to the reading experience. His honest efforts give us a classically fascinating tale of An Invisible Man, who has nothing for the eyes of people like you n’ me.