Tell, Don’t Show
The first two chapters describe in detail the arrival of the stranger who will be revealed first as the Invisible Man and then as the mad scientist Griffin. The owners of the inn are introduced and the mysterious aspect of the stranger is effectively staged. Those opening chapters are robust with dialogue and reveal the talent of Wells to do that which is drummed into the minds of wannabe writers with perhaps—actually without much doubt—too much zeal: show, don’t tell. The problem with that advice is that there are occasions when telling is simply better. Such as the recap of what has just transpired in those first two chapters which is told in one single brilliantly evocative metaphorical sentence which opens the third chapter:
“So it was that on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping village.”
That is a line which says it all and would be difficult if not impossible to “show” quite as effectively.
How Do You Describe an Invisible Man?
How exactly do you go about describing an invisible man? By making sure his clothes aren’t invisible and then forcing him to wear outrageous attire described metaphorically:
"The poor soul's had an accident or an op'ration or somethin'…and they goggles! Why, he looked more like a divin' helmet than a human man!"
Vexations of an Invisible Man
Part of the problem with becoming invisible is that one must work hard to attain the knowledge. They say knowledge is power, but the knowledge of how to become invisible…that is some serious power. Which Griffin recognizes and thus his long backstory tale told to Kemp is punctuated with the difficulties involved in attaining knowledge without needlessly being forced to share it:
“I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas—he was always prying!”
“The Furniture That Went Mad”
The novel is one of those in which the chapters are not just number, but subtitled. Chapter Six sports a metaphor as its subtitle. “The Furniture that Went Mad” is actually a figurative description of what it looks like to peer into a room occupied by an invisible man.
The Dangerously Disastrous Man
By the end, the Griffin has become something much more than merely the terror known as the Invisible Man. Only one man knows the full extent of what Griffin is capable of as long as he can continue to maintain his invisibility. By the end, the literal quality of invisibility has been exchanged for a broader and more metaphorical description. Though, admittedly, not one as pithy for a title:
“he is a danger, a disaster”
