The War of the Worlds Literary Elements

Science Fiction

The actions described takes place in the 19th-century in England, in London and its surroundings.

It is first-person narration; the narrator is unnamed, but he sees the Martians from close distances and gives bright descriptions of their actions.

The tone and mood are very intense and even pessimistic in some situations, but closer to the end, when it is obvious that the Martians are dying, the tone becomes hopeful and the mood becomes more cheerful.

The protagonist is the narrator, and the Martians are the antagonists.

The conflict is whether humans and Earth will survive an invasion by apparently hostile, ultra-evolved Martians.

The climax comes when the Martians have conquered London and there seems to be no hope for people.

The first line of the novel—"No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own"—foreshadows the arrival of the intelligent and advanced Martians on Earth.

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There is an allusion to a dreadful earthquake that happened on November the first 1755 in Lisbon. There is also an allusion to the destruction of Pompeii when the narrator describes the destruction of London.

See the separate Imagery section of this ClassicNote.

The main paradox is that Martians are so strong in technologies and weapons yet totally unprotected from the most basic of bacteria.

The central conceit of the book depends on parallelism that many humans dismissed as impossible: intelligent life was able to develop in parallel to humanity on a different world (i.e. Mars).

“Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly” ("two large dark-coloured eyes" is a metonymy for the alien)
“London, which had gone to bed on Sunday night oblivious and inert, was awakened, in the small hours of Monday morning, to a vivid sense of danger” (London is a synecdoche for residents of the city)

“Death! Death is coming! Death!”