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41 pages 1 hour read

H. G. Wells

The Island of Doctor Moreau

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1896

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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Introduction, and in the Dinghy of the Lady Vain”

The novel begins with a prefatory note from a man named Charles Edward Prendick. Charles has inherited some papers from his uncle, Edward Prendick. On February 1, 1887, Edward was aboard a ship called the Lady Vain, which sank in the Pacific Ocean. Almost a year later, on January 5, 1888, Edward was found alone in a small boat. Edward was initially unable to provide any account of what happened to him in the interval, and it was assumed that he had amnesia due to trauma. Charles has now discovered some papers in which Edward describes what happened to him after the shipwreck, and he has decided to publish them. He acknowledges that while the described events are implausible, some factual evidence does align with what Edward Prendick claims.

The narrative switches to Edward Prendick’s account of his experiences. Edward explains that what is known about the wreck of the Lady Vain is incomplete. It is widely known that seven survivors were eventually picked up (it is implied that they had resorted to cannibalism to survive); another four men, who had boarded a different boat, were assumed to have died. Edward explains that he was one of those four; one man died attempting to board the lifeboat, so three men were left stuck at sea with very limited supplies of food and water. As they became increasingly desperate, they decided to draw lots to kill and eat one man. However, the man who was selected to die resisted, and in the ensuing scuffle both he and the other man fell overboard, leaving Prendick alone on the boat. Another large ship approached and took Prendick aboard.

Chapter 2 Summary: “The Man Who Was Going Nowhere”

Prendick wakes up in a cabin aboard a ship called the Ipecacuanha. A fellow Englishman named Montgomery is tending to him. Montgomery is interested in Prendick’s training as a scientist and asks him questions about life in London. While they speak, Prendick notices the sounds of animals growling and people shouting at one another.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Strange Face”

Prendick begins to recover. Upon leaving his cabin, he encounters a strange and menacing looking man. Prendick is disturbed by the chaotic and dirty appearance of the boat, which includes several wild animals. Prendick and Montgomery notice the captain of the ship, Captain Davies, bullying the strange-looking man. Montgomery rebukes Davies, since the man (whose name is eventually revealed to be M’ling) is his servant. Montgomery and Davies get into an argument: Davies is unhappy about the presence of the animals on his boat, but Montgomery counters that, “you agreed to take the beasts” (16).

Chapter 4 Summary: “At the Schooner’s Rail”

The ship approaches an island where Montgomery plans to disembark along with the animal cargo. Prendick grows more curious as to how Montgomery ended up living on an isolated island in the Pacific and why he is bringing back an assortment of animals. Montgomery offers to tell Prendick more about his past, but Prendick tells him not to reveal anything. As Montgomery’s companion passes by in the darkness, Prendick has a sense that the strange man is somehow inhuman and terrifying.

Chapter 5 Summary: “The Landing on the Island”

Prendick awakens to find that another ship has pulled up next to the Ipecacuanha; the animals are being transferred to this ship for transport to the island. Captain Davies announces that Prendick also needs to get off the boat, and Prendick is content to disembark with Montgomery. However, a man (eventually revealed to be Doctor Moreau) refuses to take Prendick with him to the island. Prendick begs, but Davies and his crew finally force him back into the lifeboat he was found on and cut him loose. Drifting along with no supplies, Prendick realizes that he is again in danger of dying.

Chapters 1-5 Analysis

Wells’s novel begins with a frame narrative—a device in which the main story (in this case, the events that befall Prendick in the period between 1887 and 1888) is introduced through a secondary story (in which Prendick’s nephew finds secret papers decades after the events they describe). The use of a frame narrative blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, encouraging a reader to imagine that the events being described are “real;” this makes it a particularly useful device for a narrative that includes fantastical and improbable events (the novels Frankenstein and Dracula both notably make use of frame narratives). Because the frame narrative introduces Prendick’s story as if it were an actual historical record, the sinister and fantastical events that begin to unfold within the frame are presented as factual.

The context of shipwrecks and mysterious islands also sets the stage for the fantastical. The literary tradition in which a character encounters obstacles and adventures after a sea voyage goes awry can be traced across many cultures, back to ancient epics such as Homer’s Odyssey; this motif is particularly enduring because for thousands of years, sea voyages were a major way in which humans accessed remote and unknown regions. The use of shipwreck as a literary device in English fiction extends back to the 18th century, with the prominent examples of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Robinson Crusoe (1719); both early novels presented their fictional narratives as if they were factual records of actual events. For Wells, writing in England at the height of the British Empire, sea voyaging is intrinsically tied to the imperial project. By stranding his protagonist at sea, Wells could dramatize anxieties around domination and rebellion, and around the fungible boundaries of “civilization” and even humanity, that were already on the minds of his original readers.

By the time Wells was writing in the late 1800s, literary conventions and public knowledge of the wider world had changed significantly, but the trope of an individual arriving by chance in a strange place, and observing bizarre events, continued to be a useful literary device. Within the frame narrative, the plot is narrated in the first-person by Edward Prendick. This structure means that readers have access to a limited point of view (they only learn information at the same pace that Prendick does), which heightens suspense. The first-person point of view means that readers are likely aligned with Prendick’s emotions and goals; however, they are also potentially limited by his blind spots, especially his cultural assumptions and prejudices. The frame narrative partially situates Prendick as an unreliable narrator: He initially “alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain” (5). Since Prendick has lied about not remembering, the accuracy of the account he subsequently provides is also called into question.

The events that occur immediately after the sinking of the Lady Vain introduce the novel’s preoccupation with exploring the distinction between humans and animals, which in turn develops the theme of The Illusory Nature of Reason and Civilization. Prendick mentions “the far more terrible Medusa case” (7), alluding to an 1816 incident in which a French ship named the Medusa was wrecked; survivors who were able to board a life raft resorted to cannibalism while awaiting rescue, and a scandal ensued when these events became public. While Prendick and two other survivors are stranded in a small boat, one of them eventually “gave voice to the thing we all had in mind” (8). Wells never refers directly to cannibalism, but hints at realities that readers can infer, rendering them complicit in arriving at this gruesome possibility. Cannibalism is a widespread taboo in many (though not all) human societies, and someone resorting to consuming human flesh might well be regarded, by British people in the 19th century, as reverting to a more animalistic state in which the need to survive trumps any cultural constructs or taboos.

Even before Prendick arrives at the island, Wells begins to introduce the notion that human beings may be more like animals than anyone wants to believe. Prendick’s discomfort with a ship carrying cargo comprised of animals suggests an allusion to the transatlantic slave trade. For hundreds of years, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European ships (including many English vessels) transported enslaved African people to North America and the Caribbean under notoriously brutal conditions. The extreme cruelty of this practice meant that its participants necessarily regarded enslaved people as less human than themselves—thereby arguably diminishing their own humanity in the process. By the time Wells was writing in the 1890s, both the trade in enslaved people and the legal use of enslaved labor in the United States had ended; however, the idea of a cargo of living beings certainly might evoke this relatively recent history to readers. Slavery, much like cannibalism, shows the brutality that human beings can display toward one another, and therefore unsettles the assumption that human beings are somehow distinct from animals because of reason, altruism, or both.

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