The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.
The opening line of the story conveys more information that it might seem at first. The introduction of the main character of the story simply as “the stranger” will hold until Chapter 17. From the opening line to just a little past the midway point, the identity of the invisible man remains a mystery. And that is significant thematically because his literal invisibility is inextricably tied to his own self-appointed status as an outsider who has self-exiled himself from society. Weather conditions play a more prominent role than usual in this story as well and that is equally established strongly right from the beginning. Also worth noting is that the introduction of the protagonist is at point when he has already been invisible, which means this is not going to be a narrative trajectory about a misguided scientists becoming a mad scientist. The unnamed stranger will very quickly reveal he is more than halfway to that point already.
“Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”
Invisibility lures with the temptation of the great power that comes with being unseen, but that temptation leaves out the tremendous downside if one the power comes equipped with the ability to slip back into visibility at will. The power of invisibility is substantially reduced without the option for the alternative when desired and the dark side of the moon here is, well, being invisible even when you don’t want to be. This is not really a story about the power of invisibility that Griffin has convinced himself it is; it is rather about being the ultimate social outcast, the permanent outsider and the loneliness of total isolation.
“What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?”
At times Griffin can be seem well beyond any hope of lucidity, driven to the brink of absolute madness by the irony of fulfilling his dream of invisibility only to watch it turn into a nightmarish existence. A good deal of this overcharged hysteria is based on whom he is dealing with. While with the simple villagers of Iping, Griffin is very quick to anger and rarely portrays himself as the rational, highly educated scientist. By contrast, when he is with an intellectual peer like Kemp, he tends acts less like a paranoid mad scientists and more like an appropriately suspicious well-rounded student who can encapsulate the great devastating paradox of his experience in Biblical metaphor. Translation: what good is being invisible if visibility is required to enjoy its power?
"He is mad, inhuman…the man’s become inhuman, I tell you.”
Kemp’s delineation of the Griffin as inhuman is said twice in Chapter 25, the first time at the beginning and then again in the short chapter’s closing sentences. There is a level of irony here, of course, relative to the title: how can an invisible man being human? But then that is precisely the point being; the title itself is ironic because it is a paradox. Invisibility by definition confers upon a thing an inescapable absence of substance. Forget the thing about a falling down in a forest with no one around and instead consider this: if a tree is surrounded by people and none of them can see it, it is really a tree? Is a human who is there bodily but cannot be seen truly human or something else? A monster? A mutant? Whatever it may be, the fact that it is to some extent inhuman is pretty difficult to argue with. This differentiation has potentials as yet unconsidered. The distant future may make invisibility a reality just as it may deliver the possibility that one day humans may be able to live with life-sustaining organs being artificial replacements. Can or should that person be considered as fully human as those without artificial organs? Of course, in this particular sense, Kemp is referring not to his physical being, but Griffin’s state of mind, but as a writer of speculative science fiction, Wells may have originated an ethical debate that could become very real one day.
