The Invisible Man- By H.G Wells
Before we get started, let's differentiate this one from the classic Ralph Ellison novel "Invisible Man" which is another fine work that I might do another post on at some point. I'm using the opening line of this post to mimic the opening line of that book by Ellison, in where he bothers to differentiate his title from the "Hollywood movie ectoplasm" or whatever he described it as.
I'd always been curious about the book, as a general classic that seems like an important part of English language literature canon, and that I might as well know about either way. So listening to H.G Wells' narrative style and execution, I fell in love with his sentences and cadence and rhythm. There was also the issue of the plot, and the reason as to why the Invisible man is invisible. I'd always wondered, but never knew: "Was he like, born that way or something? Was it an accident in a science lab? Is he stuck like that forever? Does it wear off?"
The explanation was very fulfilling. The titular character is a scientist and develops a theory to make the human body vanish by way of causing it to not reflect any light off of it. He develops a drug that turns the skin and organs transparent by causing them to have the same "refractive index" as the air around it, like crushed powdered glass thrown in a body of water. There's a very creative explanation by the titular character to a colleague of his that he meets up with later in the book:
Visibility depends on the action of the visible bodies on light. Either a body absorbs light, or it reflects or refracts it, or does all these things. If it neither reflects nor refracts nor absorbs light, it cannot of itself be visible. You see an opaque red box, for instance, because the colour absorbs some of the light and reflects the rest, all the red part of the light, to you. If it did not absorb any particular part of the light, but reflected it all, then it would be a shining white box. Silver! A diamond box would neither absorb much of the light nor reflect much from the general surface, but just here and there where the surfaces were favourable the light would be reflected and refracted, so that you would get a brilliant appearance of flashing reflections and translucencies, -a sort of skeleton of light.
He goes on to talk about how a sheet of glass is transparent when held in the air, but dunked in water, where the refractive index is closer to that of the sheet of glass, the sheet of glass becomes nearly invisible. Then if you smash the glass into powder, and throw the powder into water, it's totally invisible. The light doesn't reflect or refract differently between the water or the powder at all, so the powder appears invisible. Powdered glass is only visible when not it water because all the little shards reflect light from many different angles due to their surface area, and none of it passes through. The invisible man's companion responds:
"Yes, yes", said Kemp. "But a man's not powdered glass!"
"No," said Griffin (the invisible man's name). "He's more transparent!"
"Nonsense!"
"That from a doctor! How one forgets! Have you already forgotten your physics, in ten years? Just think of all the things that are transparent and seem not to be so. Paper, for instance, is made up of transparent fibres, and it is white and opaque only for the same reason that a powder of glass is white and opaque. Oil white paper, fill up the interstices between the particles with oil so that there is no longer refraction or reflection except at the surfaces, and it becomes as transparent as glass. And not only paper, but cotton fibre, linen fibre, wool fibre, woody fibre, and bone, Kemp, flesh, Kemp, hair, Kemp, nails and nerves, Kemp, in fact the whole fabric of man except the red of his blood and the black pigment of his hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue. So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than water."
So the titular character goes about looking for a scientific method, developing a drug that "fills in" the gaps in our fibres, lowering the refractive quality of our bodies to that of air, so we are transparent like glass.
The imaginative reasoning here is excellent, and to me, the point of literature and fiction. We can see how life works inside of someone else's imagination.
