Biographers are quite reticent about the fact that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897) recaptures many elements of Lord Byron's Don Juan, Canto II (1819). Both writers not only revert to the iconographical element of the shipwreck, they also show man at the precarious point when he is about to degenerate into a beast and cannibal. Seen in terms of allegory, both works address the question of what happens when God (personified by the tyrannical Doctor Moreau) or the concept of the trinity (symbolised by the ship called Trinidada) ceases to exist. While philosophers like Nietzsche see in God's death the advent of the superman, both Byron and Wells share the same anthropological doubt when they regard religion as an ambivalent means to preserve the brittle façade of civilisation. As relentless critics of religion, they also indulge in the deconstruction of their literary and cultural inheritance: while Byron turns the tradition of Don Juan upside down and transforms the erotic rebel into a sea-sick anti-hero, Wells inverts features of medieval culture when he has a parley turn into an abortive attempt at communication and Dante's guide through hell replaced by a chattering ape.
Since the 19 th century modern literature has been characterized by the deconstruction and loss of the hero. While Carlyle aims at a re-definition of heroism and Hardy prefers to see the fate of his characters in the context of Greek tragedy, both Jerome K. Jerome and H. G. Wells show the world inhabited by grotesque and tragicomic anti-heroes. Deprived of volitional motion and constantly faced with abortive plans, they blunder through life on intractable bicycles which are the modern equivalents of the Wheel of Fortune. In contrast to the 18 th -century picaresque tradition, in which the anti-hero's misery is frequently mitigated by sentimentality, Joyce's 'Hades' episode in Ulysses intensifies the 19 th -century heritage of anthropological scepticism so that man is ultimately reduced to an assortment of rotting limbs and organs breeding maggots and death-moths.
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