Writer's methods — The War of the Worlds — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Wells's form, structure and language create meaning: a first-person narrator looking back on the invasion, a documentary style full of real places, times and newspapers,
the brother's second-hand story, two books, shifts of scale that make humans seem like animals, the sights and sounds of the invasion, and the scientific romance.
The first-person narrator, writing 'six years ago now' about the invasion, who mixes eyewitness memory with what he has learned since and admits what he cannot know.
A documentary style: real places from Woking to Primrose Hill, times, newspapers and telegrams, as in 'That was how the Sunday Sun put it', which make the impossible seem real.
Two narratives: the narrator's own and his brother's, told second-hand, and the panoramic view from 'a balloon in the blazing blue above London'.
Shifts of scale: humans seen as 'the infusoria under the microscope', ants, rabbits and frogs, and Martian machines that 'seemed infinitely more alive' than the Martians.
Sound, light and colour: the green smoke, the red weed and the Black Smoke, the howl of 'Ulla, ulla, ulla, ulla', and pathetic fallacy in the storm and in the dawn on Primrose Hill.
Foreshadowing and structure: 'the last civilised dinner', the two books, and an ending prepared in the first sentence's 'as mortal as his own'.
Genre: the scientific romance and invasion literature, and Wells's realism about the fantastic, keeping 'everything else human and real'.
