The War of the Worlds

The narrator realizes his struggle for survival has blotted the fate of the rest of the world from his mind. Reemerging, he experiences a profound, unfamiliar “sense of dethronement” (159), a despair that humanity is now just another species of underlings struggling to survive. This is quickly displaced by hunger and thirst, and he makes his way toward London, scavenging along the way. He turns nothing down, even gnawing at bones and attempting to eat the red weed, which is thriving and has left England looking like another planet. The narrator reveals that the weed would soon die en masse, wiped out by terrestrial bacteria. Though he encounters some animals, there is no trace of humans or Martians.

The narrator spends the night in an inn on Putney Hill. He finds some food there, which restores a capacity for reason which he realizes he has lacked for days. He attempts to sleep but finds his thoughts overrun by his role in the curate’s death, curiosity about the absent Martians, and, above all, fear for his wife, whom he prays has died swiftly and painlessly.

Unable to sleep, he leaves the inn and encounters a dingy, hostile man whom he at first does not recognize as

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