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For Monday: The Invisible Man, Appendix A, B & C from the Broadview Edition



NOTE: Remember that we do have class on Monday, because I gave you an extra class day to write Paper #2. We won't have class on Wednesday instead, and we'll just count that as the beginning of Fall Break.

Read Appendix A, B & C from our version of The Invisible Man on pages 173-195, then answer TWO of the following:

Q1: Which of the four endings of the novel do you think is the most appropriate and satisfying and why? Also, how does this version differ most from the other three? What does he add or subtract to make this ending more effective?

Q2: In Appendix B, which of the five works do you think Wells most borrows (or plagiarizes, if you want to go there) from? What idea or aspects of this work probably most influenced Wells' own work? Do you think Wells improved on these originals? If so, how?

Q3: Interestingly, of the four stories in Appendix B (not counting the silly ballad by Gilbert), two approach invisibility from a fantasy perspective, and two approach it from a science-fiction perspective. Given that invisibility was a scientific impossibility for the 19th century, do you think the the fantasy stories are more successful? Do they make the stories more uncanny and/or sublime? Or does the attempt to explain the uncanny make it more effective?

Q4: In Wells' reply to Bennet's review of 1897 (Appendix C, No.3), he responds to the idea of invisibility being impossible because of the uselessness of transparent eyelids. He writes, "You raise the point of transparent eyelids in your review, but there is another difficulty behind that which makes the whole story impossible. I believe it to be insurmountable...On these lines [the scientific complications of being invisible] you would get a very effective short story but nothing more" (191). How might this explain Wells' overall 'theory' for science-fiction and his aim in writing it?

Q5: Which of the reviews do you most agree with, and/or think is still relevant over a hundred years later? Did one reviewer see the book more clearly (and unbiasedly) than the others? Or do you feel they're all limited by the narrow lens of the 1890's? 

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