The artilleryman — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
The artilleryman
Characters
What you need to know
How Wells presents The artilleryman, and how the character develops across the text: the soldier who survives the first battle, shelters with the narrator, and reappears on Putney Hill with grand plans for humanity's survival underground that he is too idle to carry out.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'began to sob and weep like a little boy', 'It’s no kindness to the right sort of wife', 'Giants in armour, sir. Hundred feet high.', 'It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants', 'We’re eatable ants', 'it’s the man that keeps on thinking comes through', 'Cities, nations, civilisation, progress—it’s all over', 'I mean that men like me are going on living—for the sake of the breed', 'Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die', 'not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books', 'man has come back to his own', 'in a flash I saw the man plain', 'the gulf between his dreams and his powers', 'this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things'.
His two appearances: a terrified survivor in the narrator's house, then a would-be leader whose talk outruns his digging.
Context: social Darwinism and ideas of breeding a stronger race, which his plans echo, and the gap between 'a common soldier' and the narrator, 'a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes'.
