The Body Snatchers Literary Elements

Science Fiction

Mill Valley, California, 1976

Miles Bennell, telling the tale from his own perspective / memory

Frightening, threatening, earth-changing

Miles and his friends Becky Driscoll and Jack and Theodora Belecec are the protagonists; the alien life forms masquerading as their friends are the antagonists

Between the four friends and Mannie, who is trying to get them to succumb to sleep so that they can be "snatched"

The pods floating back to space, freeing Earth from the threat of being taken over, is the climax of Miles, Becky and the Belecec's efforts to fight back against the invasion.

When Miles and Becky are hiding out in Miles' office, they see giant pods being distributed to those who have family or friends in neighboring counties. This sight foreshadows the intention of the alien life forms to take over the country county by county, state by state.

Mannie tells Miles and Becky that being taken over by the pod and changed forever will not hurt them. This idea underplays the fact they will be stripped of their ability to feel emotion, make love, or have children, deprivations which will hurt them immeasurably.

"We shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them in the streets, and in the hills, we shall never surrender"
Miles alludes to Winston Churchill's famous wartime speech, in which he vows to "fight them on the beaches" of France.

"You"ll simply see a town, in a few places a little shabbier and run-down than it quite ought to be, but - not startlingly so. The people, some of them, around the bookstore plaza, for example, may seem to you strange, listless and uncommunicative, and may impress you as a little weird. You'll see more houses for sale than can be quite accounted for; the death rate here is rather higher than the county average, and sometimes it's hard to know what to write on a death certificate. On and around certain areas clumps of trees, patches of vegetation and occasional animals sometimes die from no apparent cause."
The author paints an image of a town that has died a little and has not really recovered from the invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

Although the pods are referred to as "body snatchers," they are actually snatching the minds of their victims. Physically those they have morphed into are still identical to how they have always been. It is their capacity for emotion that has been snatched.

There is a parallel between the way in which Professor Budlong dismisses the likelihood if the pods being on Earth deliberately to take people over and the way in which Mannie dismisses the notion of people being taken over as a type of mass hysteria.

The town was determined to stop Miles and Becky from leaving. "Town" here actually means that the people who lived in the town rather than the town itself.

The town was letting itself fall, attributing to the town the capacity for deciding to let itself go to rack and ruin.