The War of the Worlds Exile Quotes

With this passage, we're back to metaphorical exile. We've mostly argued that the Martian attack displaces humanity from top dog to… just another mid-sized dog. There's another way to look at exile, though, which is that the Martian invasion makes the world weird. Think of it: you're at home ("home" = "Earth"), when some Martians drop by and start moving your stuff around. Suddenly, your home doesn't seem so homey anymore. Here, the Martian Heat-Ray makes the narrator think differently about the common.

There's one possible benefit of exile. When you're on top, you don't have to think about certain issues or stretch yourself to learn. (Not sure what you mean? Let's use a concrete example. For much of the 20th century, the language that everyone wanted to speak was English. Maybe in France people would learn both French and English, but in England or the US, you could get by just speaking English, so people who spoke English didn't need to stretch themselves and learn a new language.) Here, the narrator is starting to reconsider the lives of animals. Whereas we may think that ironclads are totally normal, animals might be freaked out by them.

And we're back to literal exile. Now, literal exile might not sound very interesting – it's just people who lived somewhere now have to go elsewhere. But we can also think about exile and colonialism/imperialism. When Britain (and other colonial powers) started to come into an area, whoever was there before would have to make space for these invaders. This literal exile is just the British being treated as they treated others.