The man, the misanthrope, invisible or not, was always doomed. In HG Wells's The Invisible Man, I was expecting to find a sympathetic figure, the ailing stand-in for the reader. No doubt I had superheroes in mind. The Elephant Man too. Instead, I was surprised to discover Wells seems to be describing a mass shooter.
Griffin, the Invisible Man, fits a common profile. He's an angry loner. In recounting the years of his obsession with his work, people were, at best, incidental. But the word "invisible" and all forms thereof isn't used nearly as often as "fools." ("Anger" is a close second.) To Griffin, everyone, including those with a legitimate problem with him and those going about their ordinary business, is a fool. The story begins in media res, so one might initially think it's his desperate circumstances that have made him rude and, eventually, furious. It turns out, however, that he was the same man before he became invisible. Pausing to think about how one might actually survive invisibility, I mused: If he were just polite....
My mood darkens remembering all the times I've read about a mass shooter and his ravings, when I couldn't help but think something similar. If only he had--good sense? A measure of self-awareness? The Invisible Man is so utterly lost that such speculations are facile. His life is devoid of any sort of joy. He's indifferent to his father's death for no good reason. He's paranoid. He feels persecuted, then is persecuted, for good reason. He finally, inevitably, sees no other option but to reshape society through fear and violence, unleashing "the Terror." At which point he gets his hands on a gun and shoots somebody.
The language is flat, even clumsy, at times. This is a minor flaw when weighed against Wells's gifts of psychological nuance and imagination, contained in a gripping yarn. One flaw that's not so easy to forget, as a feature of the writer's worldview as well as a sign of how he might go wrong in the future, is that the narrator seems to share something of the Invisible Man's contempt for people generally. At every turn Griffin sees fools (and dolts and stupid bumpkins). Yet, outside his observation, they're hardly if ever seen otherwise. When the hero, another scientist, explicitly described as a "hero," is introduced or maybe just after, he hears gunshots outside and says: "What are the asses up to now?" And in the final scene, the greed of an ignorant, lying, thieving bum represents a lingering danger.
Still, within the bounds of the novel, the Invisible Man is the worst of the worst. In a halfbaked (foolish?) attempt to improve his chances at escape, he reaches out to someone to become his accomplice. Explaining his choice, he says he recognizes another outcast. The self-pitying declaration illumines one way of interpreting invisibility. In the bloodshed that eventuates by book's end, in his vision of becoming a dictator, he desires the opposite: extreme visibility.
