The War of the Worlds

The first half of Book 2 abandons returns to the narrator and the curate, spotlighting the complete decay of their relationship and the intimate window their unlikely imprisonment opens for them onto the Martians. As far as the curate is concerned, these chapters allow Wells to use him to flesh out his criticism of the moral ineptitude of organized religion. The curate’s traumatized paralysis robs him of all but the most basic desires, but when the narrator attempts to limit the curate’s intake of food and drink, in which he has begun to indulge “impulsively in heavy meals at long intervals” (146), thereby putting their long-term survival at risk, the curate responds with threats to alert the Martians to their presence, which he eventually fulfills. As a stand-in for the institutions of Western European Christianity, Wells’s curate constitutes a particularly damning indictment. Through this character, Wells lambasts the motivations and leadership of his culture’s organized religions, suggesting that their selfishness and inflexibility have not only enabled the calamities of colonialism and industrialization, but that they have worsened them.

However, this criticism is tempered by a modicum of hypocrisy in the narrator’s treatment of the curate. While the curate’s actions are undeniably more reprehensible and selfish than the narrator’s, the narrator too is struggling profoundly with what he has seen and experienced, and he does not always manage these struggles with the utmost grace. This double standard presents itself from the very first page of Book 2 when the narrator complains “of the sight of [the curate’s] selfish despair” (127), which bothers him so much that he locks himself away from his companion. Earlier on that same page, the narrator speaks of experiencing “anxiety for my wife” so intense that “I paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence” (127). Perhaps if the narrator had seen their mutual despair as a commonality that could bind them closer, their relationship would not have soured so significantly.

Moreover, the narrator is also guilty of reckless decisions that put them at risk of death. After the two rest for a time in a shed in Chapter 1 of Book 2, the narrator decides to go on before the curate is ready, a move he describes as “the most foolhardy thing I ever did. For it was manifest the Martians were about us” (130). If not for a conveniently located ditch, both men—for the curate had joined the narrator despite his apparently quite reasonable hesitation—would likely have met their ends. Certainly, the curate’s reckless selfishness in their extensive period of seclusion is difficult to excuse, but there is reason to wonder if things might have turned out differently had the narrator treated his companion with more charity, especially considering that the reader sees only the narrator’s perspective.

Their near-death experience upon emerging from the shed begins a pattern that will repeat across the first half of Book 2: that of risky behavior inadvertently providing the narrator with the experiences that will allow him to claim that “no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action as I did” (142). At this moment, the narrator watches a Martian use his fighting-machine to pluck up human victims and deposit them “into the great metallic carrier which projected behind him […]. It was the first time I realized that the Martians might have any other purpose than destruction with defeated humanity” (130). Later, the horrified narrator witnesses the grisly end of this process, that the Martians capture humans to feed on them, for “they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins” (138-39).

Although this process is so horrifying to the narrator that he “could not endure even to continue watching” (139), he also voices a certain admiration for it: “The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable,” the narrator asserts, “if one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by eating and the digestive process” (139). This surprising observation is one of many contradictory evaluations the narrator makes as part of a long section of Chapter 2 of Book 2 in which he discusses the discoveries he made while studying the Martians through the peephole. Martians, it turns out, are in many ways far simpler organisms than humans. They have no noses, no digestive systems (hence the blood injection), and no need for sex or sleep (138-40). A Martian is little more than eyes, a single ear, a system of tentacles that the narrator refers to as hands, and a huge brain. While the narrator has already established that these creatures are profoundly disgusting, he cannot help but admire the evolutionary brilliance of their simple, efficient forms. He seems to envy their lack of digestive tracts for “lift[ing] [them] above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion” (139), and he similarly praises their asexuality for freeing them from “the tumultuous emotions that arise from that difference among men” (140). By the time the narrator shares his belief that humans “are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out” (143), the modern reader, whose life is lived with the benefit of a great many machines of transportation and communication that are far closer to those employed by the Martians than even Wells might have dreamed possible, recognizes the author’s prescience in suggesting that humanity is evolving toward a form similar to these Martians, who “have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs” (143).

In terms of the colonialism allegory, recognizing these Martians as humanity’s destiny again serves to humanize the oppressor, yet it would be a mistake to view this as an exoneration. Whether humans are evolving into them or not, Wells still makes his Martians grotesque and so cautions against giving way to the trends that might lead us to such a future. He even predicts the anxiety that plagues modern humanity regarding artificial intelligence and excessively life-like technology in general in the narrator’s observations about their remarkable handling-machines: “The contrast between the swift and complex movements of these contrivances and the inert, panting clumsiness of their masters was acute, and for days I had to tell myself repeatedly that these latter were indeed the living of the two things” (147). Like the narrator, the reader cannot help but wonder if something is amiss in a society where intelligent life has given over its most prized attributes to the machines it has built.