The narrator — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
The narrator
Characters
What you need to know
How Wells presents The narrator, and how the character develops across the text: a comfortable writer on philosophy who watches Mars through a telescope, is driven by terror, curiosity and the will to survive, kills the curate, nearly loses his mind, and lives on haunted but reunited with his wife.
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: 'busy upon a series of papers discussing the probable developments of moral ideas as civilisation progressed', 'I was a battleground of fear and curiosity', 'I ran weeping silently as a child might do', 'Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods', 'I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote', 'Something very like the war fever that occasionally runs through a civilised community had got into my blood', 'I wanted to be in at the death', 'With a queer feeling of impersonal interest', 'What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?', 'I gripped myself with both hands', 'the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man', 'I stood my trial, my only trial, for that moment of wrath and fear', 'There were no witnesses—all these things I might have concealed', 'an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind'.
Form: an unnamed first-person narrator who is both a witness and a would-be scientific observer, and who confesses his own brutality, panic and lapses of memory.
Context: the scientific romance's nameless, often powerless hero, and a narrator who is 'a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes'.
