Character & Narration
Characters & Narration
Unlike most novels, The War of the Worlds has very few developed characters. The narrator is unnamed, the secondary characters are types rather than individuals, and the Martians are described in biological rather than psychological terms. This is deliberate. Wells is not writing a character study — he is writing a speculative parable about what would happen if Britain’s imperial assumptions were challenged. The characters serve the argument, not the other way around.
The Narrator
The unnamed narrator is a middle-class “professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes” living in Woking. His ordinariness is important — he is an Everyman figure. His scientific education allows him to observe and analyse the Martians, but his emotional responses are entirely human: fear, confusion, despair, and ultimately a cautious hope. Wells uses his limited perspective to create uncertainty and suspense.
The unnamed narrator is an Everyman figure — his ordinariness allows the reader to identify with him and imagine themselves in the invasion. His scientific background enables analysis, but his emotional responses are universal: fear, confusion, and despair.
The narrator writes his account retrospectively — he is looking back on events that have already happened. This creates a tension between the terrified man living through the invasion and the calmer, more analytical voice reflecting on it afterwards. Wells uses this dual perspective to combine the immediacy of first-person experience with the authority of hindsight. The narrator occasionally references events he could not have witnessed directly, explaining that he learned about them later from his brother or from published accounts. This journalistic approach adds verisimilitude — it feels like a genuine testimony rather than a neat fictional narrative.
Crucially, the narrator is morally ambiguous. He kills the curate (or at least strikes him unconscious, leading to his death). He struggles with cowardice, hiding underground rather than fighting. He is not a hero but an ordinary man doing what he must to survive. Wells deliberately avoids creating a traditional protagonist — there is no climactic battle, no clever plan to defeat the aliens. The narrator simply endures. This is a radical choice for Victorian fiction, which typically celebrated heroic individualism.
The Artilleryman
The artilleryman appears twice: first as a shell-shocked survivor, then as a self-appointed visionary. His second appearance is more significant. He outlines grandiose plans for rebuilding civilisation underground, selecting the “able-bodied, clean-minded” to survive. His rhetoric echoes Social Darwinist ideas about the survival of the fittest. But his tunnel is barely started. Wells uses him as a satire of people who respond to crisis with big talk and no action.
The artilleryman’s rhetoric also reveals a disturbing authoritarianism. He talks about selecting who is “worth” saving, dividing humanity into the strong and the weak. This echoes Social Darwinist thinking and anticipates the eugenics movement that would gain influence in the early twentieth century. Wells — who himself held complicated views on eugenics — presents these ideas with enough surface appeal to show how seductive they can be, before exposing their hollowness through the artilleryman’s failure to act on them.
The curate breaks down completely under the stress of the invasion. He quotes scripture obsessively, hoards food, and becomes a danger to the narrator’s survival. Wells, an atheist, uses the curate to argue that religious faith, when not backed by genuine moral character, collapses under pressure. The curate is a contrast with the narrator, who survives through practical reason rather than faith.
The Martians as Characters
The Martians are described in purely biological terms: large brains, no digestive systems, reproducing by budding. Wells deliberately avoids giving them personalities or motivations beyond survival. They are a narrative force rather than characters. This makes them more terrifying — they cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with, or appealed to. They treat humans with the same indifference that humans show to insects.
Wells describes the Martians biologically (brains, tentacles, budding reproduction) to remove any possibility of communication or empathy. They are a force of nature, not villains. This makes them more terrifying and reinforces the Darwinian theme: survival is about biology, not morality.
The narrator’s brother provides a second perspective on the invasion, describing the London exodus. This dual viewpoint expands the novel’s scope without breaking the first-person framework. Wells uses the brother to show events the narrator could not witness, while maintaining the subjective, limited feel of eyewitness testimony.
Character as Function
In traditional Victorian novels, characters are developed through dialogue, backstory, and psychological insight. Wells does almost none of this. The narrator has no name. The curate and artilleryman are defined by their social roles, not their personalities. The Martians have no individual identity at all. This is deliberate: Wells is writing an allegory, not a character study. Each figure represents a type of response to catastrophe: practical endurance (narrator), religious collapse (curate), empty rhetoric (artilleryman). Understanding this principle is essential for AO2 analysis in the exam.