reader’s changing perception of the Invisible Man. We are simultaneously sympathetic to his situation and horrified at the way he can sacrifice a cat (p. 176) to science with no thought of its suffering or steal money entrusted to his father, thus forcing the old man to commit suicide (p. 173). The rambling autobiographical sketch he gives to Kemp (chapters XVII—XXIV) shows him to be more brilliant than the unimaginative Kemp but also unscrupulous, egotistical, and, finally, tyrannical. Mad, either from ingesting chemicals or from the sense of power invisibility confers, Griffin has, as Kemp says, “cut himself off from his kind” (p. 209). He becomes a superman but one who seeks to bend society to his will.

The ending of The Invisible Man is charged with pathos. Surrounded, he is kicked to death (pp. 222-223) by workmen who are afraid and as indifferent to the marvelous fact of Griffin’s invisibility as the Eloi are to the presence of the Time Traveller. He even begs for mercy, something he himself is incapable of bestowing. But here Wells, just as he did in The Time Machine, when the Time Traveller disappears perhaps to return at another time, leaves a thread behind: The Invisible Man’s diaries, useless in the ignorant hands of the drunken Mr. Marvel, may fall into the hands of another scientist, one who may use invisibility as a means to change the world.

Alfred Mac Adam, a professor at Barnard College—Columbia University, teaches Latin American and comparative literature. He is a translator of Latin American fiction and writes extensively on art. Between 1984 and 2002, Mac Adam was the editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, a publication of the Americas Society.

The Time Machine

AN INVENTION

I

THE TIME TRAVELLER (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a reconditea matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silverb caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents,1 embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forennger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it:) and his fecundity. c

“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”

“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.

“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”

“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.2

“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”

“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—”

“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

“Don’t follow you,” said Filby.

“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” 3

Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”

“That,” said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; “that ... very clear indeed.”

“Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accessiond of cheerfulness. “Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension