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H.G> Well's The Stolen Body Essay

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In H.G. Wells’s “The Stolen Body”, he explores the desire of man to push the conventionally-accepted moral limits of human life, and play with fields like time travel, teleportation, and specifically in this story astral projection. Wells explores the consequences that can stem from such endeavors, along with the benefits. Because he ends the story on a positive note, despite the mayhem that stemmed from the astral projection in the body of the story, his words do little to deter the reader from exploring such fields, if this is in fact his goal. Wells indicates that Mr. Bessel was “particularly interested in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living,” yet makes no implications or judgments on this fact.
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Bessel. But what negative outcomes really stem from this? In Frankenstein, the monster brings heartbreak and destruction to the title character’s life. In “The Stolen Body”, the only consequences are that his spirit had “pain and suffering from his wounds” and tears “wrung from him by his physical distress. That’s pretty strong diction, but is immediately softened by the closing line, “his heart was full of gladness to know that he was nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men”. Quite frankly it is unclear whether the author’s position on the subject is one of encouragement for the aspiring scientist, or words of caution. In this story specifically, he seems to deter readers from attempting astral projection on the surface, but perhaps not so underneath. It’s as though Wells feels obligated to warn the reader about what happened to Mr. Bessel and Mr. Vincey, the main characters, but because it has a happy ending, it leaves it open to interpretation regarding whether or not it was a worthwhile endeavor.
The tone that Wells employs is curious too. It is very light-hearted, even childlike all throughout. Typically, an author wants the main character’s darkest and most desperate hour to evoke feelings of empathy from his or her readers, but in this case the story is still told in a similar manner to the way one would narrate a comic book. However, Wells is likely not seeking to appeal to children, with tales of demon possessions and “projecting an

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