Mirror or Foil?

Dr. Jekyll took a cautious, but curious sip of his homemade scientific discovery. As agony ripped through him, and his body twisted into a gruesome form he became Hyde a murderous beast hell bent on destruction. Yes, there was a stimulant to the creation of a monster, but the monster in essence was still Dr. Jekyll – just a deeply concealed demon that he tried to disguise. The characters, Bedford and Cavor, in H.G Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moon were not that gruesome but they share a commonality with Dr. Jekyll and Hyde; they both are the mirrored form of the other. Bedford and Cavor are Wells’ character creation to represent his critique on society, instead of creating two individual characters he created mirrors, two characters that possess the same tragic flaws and both used as a figure head of a corrupt aspect of society.

Wells was not a novice when it came to creating profound characters, those that were able to portray the deep rooted messages that his stories held. He had known the tricks of the trade to make the characters of Bedford and Cavor not only believable, but influential as well. Many people assume there needs to be an exceptional background to a story or it does not affect the audience, but the well-known writing resource website Owl at Perdue asserts that, “The character is the most important aspect of fiction.” It is the character(s) that brings the story together; they are the foundations to understanding the background and ultimately the point to every tale. “So characters serve rhetorical purposes and these purposes must have a relevance to the actual world” (Wood 166). Wood points out that it is the character that brings out the actual story and pulls it into a world. In The First Men in the Moon...

... middle of paper ...

...ic characterization.

Works Cited

McLean, Steven. "'Science is a Match that Man has just Got Alight' : Science and Social Organisation in the First Men in the Moon." The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells : Fantasies of Science. Ed. Palgrave. New York: macmillian, 2009. 117-150. Print.

Milstead, John "Bedford Vindicated: A Response to Carlo Pagetti on "the First Men in the Moon" Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 9, no. 1 (Mar., 1982), Pp. 103-105. Published by: SF-TH IncArticle

" Print.

Tanemura, Kenny. "Fiction Writing Basics: Characters." Owl at Purdue. 2012 1995.Web. Purdue University. .

Wood, Tahir. Author's Characters and the Character of the Author: The Typical in Fiction." Journal of Literary Semantics 40.2 (2011): 159-176. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Mar. 2012." Print.