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: a nameless narrator who is 'a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes', and whose ordinary suburban life, drawn from Wells's own knowledge of Woking, contrasts with the alien invaders.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
