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Situational Irony
Chapter 13: A Parley
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel is full of fantastical ideas and events, but Wells uses a plainspoken style and leans on figurative language in a mostly utilitarian way. In Chapter 13, Prendick tries to drown himself to escape from Moreau, who he believes is cutting into humans to make them more animal-like:
[Montgomery and Moreau] both shouted together as if to drown my voice. And behind them lowered the staring faces of the Beast Men, wondering, their deformed hands hanging down, their shoulders hunched up. They seemed, as I fancied then, to be trying to understand me, to remember something of their human past.
In this passage, Prendick imagines the Beast Folk's posture as a mirror of his own posture. This comparison is "fanciful," as he admits, but the style of his narration is anything but fanciful. He is simply describing what he saw at the time. This style is connected to Prendick's status as an unreliable narrator. His straightforwardness makes him seem trustworthy, but he is the first to admit that he is narrating his own eyewitness account as he experienced it at the time. For instance, he allows the reader to be convinced along with him, for the first half of the novel, that Moreau's experiments are being performed on humans rather than animals. By describing himself as a mirror for the Beast Folk, Prendick gives the reader a sense of how uncanny it was to come face to face with these creatures before he knew how they were created.
By using straightforward language, Wells manages to tell a horror story that feels to the reader like it is real and earned, not overblown and too sensationalized. This is not horror for horror's sake. When intense imagery and other figurative language does come into play, it reads as an honest attempt to convey Prendick's experience. This sense of measured sensationalism invites the reader to seriously reflect on the issues at the heart of the novel. For instance, Prendick's ability to see himself in the Beast Folk invites readers to consider what makes someone human.
Related Themes:
