The War of the Worlds (Characters)

Characters

The Artilleryman

The narrator first encounters him outside of the window of his house. He is from a regiment of the army that has been destroyed by the Martians' Heat-Ray, and he is shocked and barely able to speak. They travel together until they come upon a cavalry unit, who tell the artilleryman where he can find a superior officer to whom he can report. The army is in such disarray that he has trouble finding who is in charge. The narrator is separated from him when the Martians attack with their Heat-Ray, and the narrator escapes by diving under the river.

Their paths cross again in Chapter 7 of Book 2, when London is just a ghost town. The artilleryman is protective of his territory and food until he recognizes the narrator as the man who had helped him before. Then he shares his idea about how the human race will repopulate itself. The Martians, he explains, will imprison those who fight them, and fatten them up for food and breed them like cattle, but humans who manage to stay out of their way and who do not prove to be difficult will probably be left alone. He has planned out a new, underground society, living in sewers, led by the strongest. They will keep learning until they acquire knowledge of how to beat the Martians.

The narrator is impressed with the artillery-man's plan until he notices that, for all of his talk, the man is not really willing to work hard at all. The man has dug a small hole, and then he wanders outside to look at the sky; instead of working through the night, he wants to smoke, drink champagne, and play cards. The narrator soon leaves him, disillusioned.

The Curate

In Chapter 13 of Book 1, the narrator finds the curate looking over him after he has fallen asleep on a river bed, and they travel together. He quickly finds that the holy man's fears are unnerving to him, a position that angers him all the more because he feels that there is no point to being a religious man if religion cannot at least give the curate the courage to face his situation. When a cylinder from Mars lands next to a house that they are ransacking together, the narrator and the curate find themselves trapped, afraid of going outside because the Martians who have just arrived might find them and feast upon them. Food becomes scarce, but the curate continues to eat wastefully and to cry out in fear. Finally, when he becomes mentally unstable and makes enough noise to attract the nearby Martians, the narrator hits him in the head with an ax (although, he points out, he has mercy and hits him with the blunt end). The Martian who investigates the sound takes the curate's body with him, presumably to drink his blood.

Mrs. Elphinstone

Mrs. Elphinstone is a woman who is escaping from London with her sister. Thieves are trying to steal their horse carriage from them when the narrator's brother intervenes. Mrs. Elphinstone is pale in complexion and dressed in white. She is nervous, screaming for her husband George. Her sister-in-law, on the other hand, is dark, slim, and cool; it is she who draws a gun and fires at the attackers.

Lord Garrick

Lord Garrick is the Chief Justice. When the narrator's brother is trying to escape London, Lord Garrick is brought through the crowd on a stretcher. despite his high place in society, he receives no special treatment in all of the turmoil.

Henderson

Henderson is a journalist from London, who lives near where the first Martian cylinder arrives. He dispatches an early report of the situation, but he is one of the first people killed by the Martians when they emerge from the cylinder and fire their Heat-Rays.

The Narrator

The name of the first-person narrator of this novel is never given to the reader. He is a philosopher, working on series of papers that are to discuss the development of moral ideas, when the invasion begins. He lives southeast of London, not far from where the Martian invasion begins. Because of his connection to the world of academia, he is invited to look at Mars through the telescope of Ogilvy, a prominent astronomer, and is given updates on the knowledge of the canister that lands on Earth as Ogilvy receives them. He borrows a wagon to take his wife away to live with relatives, but returns to his home as the tide of refugees starts arriving.

The stress of the situation takes its toll on the narrator. Trapped in a house just outside of a Martian encampment, his irritation with the curate that he has been traveling with turns to panic when the man will not be quiet. Fearful of being discovered, the narrator murders the other man and hides while Martian tentacles drag the body away.

His calm philosophical attitude is also broken when he listens to the artilleryman's plans to restore the human population. Having earlier hoped for a victory over the Martians, he comes to realize that the best that can be hoped for would be for some humans to escape from them, like insects that manage to survive by staying out of sight. In the course of a few weeks his understanding of the world has gone from assuming that humans dominate to viewing humans as relatively insignificant.

At the end of the book, his mind snaps briefly. Finding the Martians dead, he thinks that he is the only human who has survived. He is later told about his ravings on this subject by people who care for him, who he does not notice. Having survived this episode, his despair reaches its depth when he returns to his house with the thought that he will never see his wife again. After her return, he settles into a domestic pattern somewhat like the life he once led, but he can never really be comfortable again.

The Narrator's Brother

Chapters 14, 16 and 17 of Book 1 relate the experiences of the narrator's brother, who is a medical student in London. At the same time that the narrator is fleeing from the Martians' Heat-Rays, his brother is unaware of anything that is happening. It is through his eyes that readers experience the invasion's effect on the large city. He sees the gossip and the panicked exodus of thousands of people once they become convinced that the rumors of an alien invasion are true. He reads the news of the release of the Black Smoke that the Martians use to exterminate masses of people.

When he does join all the people fleeing the city with whatever belongings they can carry, the narrator's brother joins up with a woman, Mrs. Elphinstone, and her sister-in-law, after saving them from bandits who are trying to steal their carriage and horse. The sister-in-law fires a pistol at the thieves, and then gives it to the narrator's brother, trusting him with their security. He travels with them along the Thames River to the sea, where they pay their way onto a boat. As the boat is going out to sea, they see a flying ship that the Martians have evidently made since arriving on Earth, spraying the Black Smoke on the people on shore. Readers must assume, from the fact that the narrator knows these stories, that the brother survived the Martian attack.

The Narrator's Wife

The narrator's wife plays a minor role in this novel. When he first comes home from examining the unidentified metal canister that has arrived from Mars, she has dinner on the table, providing a contrast between the strange adventure that is beginning and the normal life he is used to. When the Martian advance is predicted, he borrows a dog cart and takes her to Leatherhead to live with his cousin. Later in the book, he hears that Leatherhead has been destroyed and all of its inhabitants killed. He despairs that he will never see his wife again, but she shows up at their house after the invasion is all over.

Ogilvy

An astronomer friend of the narrator's, he invites the narrator to look at Mars through his telescope after the first cylinder is fired from Mars at the Earth. Later, he joins Stent and some other astronomers to investigate the cylinder where it has landed at Horsell Common. He is with the party that approaches the cylinder with a white flag of peace, and the Martians that emerge from the cylinder obliterate the members of the peace party with their Heat-Ray.

Stent

The Astronomer Royal, he leads the expedition team that includes Ogilvy in investigating the first Martian cylinder when it arrives. He is one of the first people killed by the Martians.