A Comparative Analysis of H.G. Wells’ Island Essay

H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and Elie Wiesel’s Night are strikingly similar accounts of modern savagery and inhumanness that affect seemingly civilized societies. What is revealing however is that Wells’ novel is an entirely fictional work which proposes to analyze the effects of the advancement of science and technology in the absence of solid ethical principles, while Wiesel’s work is an autobiographical account of the author’s experiences in several concentration camps, during the Holocaust. The similarity between the experiences of the two narrators points to the inherent savageness of man. A comparative analysis of the two works exposes human civilization as a myth rather than a reality. Wiesel’s grim, nightmarish experience in the concentration camp almost surpasses the horror of Well’s fantastical island. Man is debunked as a savage, beast-like creature whose acts prove to be even more frightening and unimaginable than those of animals. The horrors produced by Doctor Moreau and by Hitler are equally unbelievable. While animal behavior is characterized only by instinctual cruelty urged by the necessity of survival, human cruelty exemplified by the experiments of Moreau and by Hitler’s massacre of six million Jews, is at once more perilous and more disturbing. In man, the animal instincts are paired with reason and imagination, just as in the symbolic hybrids created by Moreau, and thus the potency of evil increases tremendously. The two works start off from similar premises. The cruel and unprincipled experiments concocted by Doctor Moreau take place on a secluded island with a symbolic name: Noble’s Isle. In order to improve human genetics, Moreau performs vivisections and other horrifying experiments on various animals, attempting to create a new, superior race of hybrids. His experiments are symbolic because they draw attention to man’s double nature, as an animal and as a creature endowed with reason. The island’s seclusion allows the scientist to establish an empire of horrors. In Wiesel’s Night, the nightmare is also compressed into the unitary and enclosed space of the concentration camp. The barbed wire that surrounds the camps from all sides and that bears the ironic warning sign of danger, marks the boundaries of a limited and entrapping world where only the horrors are infinite: â€Å"We were caught in a trap, right up to our necks. The doors were nailed up; the way back was finally cut off. The world was a cattle wagon hermetically sealed† (Wiesel 30). Moreover, time itself is condensed into a single and prolonged night, an unending nightmare that knows no respite. Moreover, the similarity between Moreau’s design of perfecting the human race and Hitler’s project for exterminating the Jews and purifying the Aryan race, reveals the fact that man is prone to atrocities and inhuman acts that are much more terrifying than those of beasts. The hybrid race created by Moreau is a symbol of manhood in general and its proximity to savageness despite technological advancements and scientific progress, while also being similar to the new breed beast –like men created by the Holocaust. The extreme terror and dehumanizing physical suffering of the prisoners of the concentration camp, change them into savage beings that are limited to a few basic instincts. The horrors that they have to endure are almost unbearable. The Jews are therefore rapidly transformed into beasts who try to cling to the miserable and terrible lives they have. Hungered, beaten, separated from families and friends, the men and women lose their individuality and their human feelings. Gradually, as the horrors progress, they become so inured in the beastly life they lead that they no longer communicate or try to express themselves. Any trace of human feeling or dignity disappears from the men that are brought even lower than the animal condition: â€Å"Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men† (Wiesel 45). The sheer nightmare of permanent terror and sufferance, without the light of hope or comfort is increased by the Jews’ awareness that they were being persecuted by fellow beings. As the narrative progresses, the horrors also increase. The thousands of Jews that live and work in crammed-up places become walking skeletons. With scarcely enough food to sustain life and insufficient clothing to shield them from the weather and with no treatment for their illnesses the remaining Jews survive only by a miracle. They are surrounded by death: its threat blazes in the furnace of the crematories where the ‘selected’ ones are taken, it piles up in the corpses that are ubiquitous in the camps, it takes the loved ones away and threatens their own emaciated bodies at any moment. The cruelties that these people suffer are beyond description and their endurance impressive. The author himself was only fifteen years old at the time that he had to bear witness and to be a part of these horrors. His deep religious feeling and his faith are shaken forever by the black memory of the holocaust: â€Å"Never shall I forget those moments, which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never† (Wiesel 43). While the Jews are reduced to less than beastly conditions, their force of endurance is overwhelming. According to Wiesel, the suffering people gathered there were greater than God himself because of their spiritual strength that makes them pray even in these dire conditions. The image of the Jews sufferance is easily comparable to that of the beast-like creations of Doctor Moreau: â€Å"And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect† (Wells 159). Significantly, the Jews as well as other people had regarded Hitler’s promise of exterminating an entire race of people as an impossible farce. The civilized man deems himself safe from extreme pain inflicted by another human being. The narrator himself believes at the beginning that nothing like what was rumored about the camps could be true in the middle of the twentieth century. The same disbelief surrounds Prendick’s account of the scientific experiments on the island. The ultimate feeling that seizes both Prendick and Wiesel in front of these atrocities is the fact that they do not have the desire to return to mankind, despite their sufferance: â€Å"It is strange, but I felt no desire to return to mankind. I was only glad to be quit of the foulness of the Beast People† (Wells 166). This emphasizes the fact that real cruelty is much more often witnessed in man than in animals. The two works describe the nightmarish experiences of the narrators. Entrapped alongside the direst human savagery, the Jews have no choice but to bow to it and expect their own end. Their endurance is obviously superhuman. As in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the liberation of the last Jews is brought by their revolt. This liberation however will never shake the curtain of the horrors that remain inscribed in history as a testimony to human savageness and its persistence in the modern world. ? Works Cited: Wells, H. G. The Island of Doctor Moreau. New York: Signet Classics, 1996. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Holt McDougal, 1999.