Responders: Good job reading and responding to one another. Since you all responded well before the due date, I would have liked to see a continuation of the conversation. You don’t have to limit your responses to one. The more you respond to each other the better!

I think that yes they will provide a sense of false comfort to the people, because they are so much more advanced they could easily take advantage of Earth.

Amber Jones

While the novel can be related to “Lord of the Flies”, it is better to compare the sense of survival rather than the sense of comfort. The earth is island upon which the people will fight not only the martians but each other to survive. This is already evidenced by the man being pushed into the sand pit. Similarly, in “Lord of the Flies”, the boys had to defend themselves against each other and the tribe they weren’t in (Jack’s or Ralph’s). The beast could be compared to the martians and the people themselves at the same time. The sense of comfort was only present for the first hours in “War of the Worlds”. In “Lord of the Flies” it stayed for much longer. Thus, the survival theme connects more closely than the false comfort theme.

I would have to disagree with Sonam and agree with Taran’s statement. I think that the capsule is like the island. They were both items that the people had not experienced so their curiosity was built by them. If you put yourself in either situation, not realizing that there is danger most likely you would do the same thing. So yes the creatures do give a sense of false comfort at first.

On the other hand I think that this feeling disappears much faster than it did on the island. As soon as the capsule starts to open the fear inside the people starts to build.

So I guess I am going to contradict myself by saying that no the two items are not the same, but they do share common characteristics.

First off, Taran I’m pretty sure that the discussion director is supposed to start the conversation, but that’s okay. To answer your question I personally believe that the martians will end up luring the humans of Earth into a false sense of security. This is because we know after reading the first few chapters that these martians are very intelligent creatures due to the fact that they are capable of space travel. To go back up to the connections you made to “Lord of the Flies” I would have to disagree with what you said about the island creating a false sense of security. On the island in “Lord of the Flies” all of the boys had known that they should not wander off on their own and that they should stick together to survive, so it wasn’t really a false sense a security the island was giving off to kill the boys. It was probably the kid with the scars fault that he had wandered off when he got scared. So it is my belief that it wasn’t the false sense of security that the island was giving off that contributed to the killing of the boy with the scar, but rather the LACK of security that was ever present at their homes. What I mean by this is that by their age they had come to expect a certain amount of security whether it by family or friends, so I believe that since these boys were so used to feeling secure, when this security was taken away they didn’t act with enough caution.