The War of the Worlds

Wells uses light, darkness, and color symbolically throughout the novel. Chiefly, these images fulfill three purposes.

Firstly, artificial lights function as symbols of civilization, both human and Martian. Chapter 1 ends with the narrator’s wife pointing out “the red, green, and yellow signal lights hanging in a framework against the sky,” which the narrator says, “seemed so safe and tranquil” (11). In this instance and elsewhere, humans take comfort in the lights of their civilization as signs of its strength and stability. Of course, the Martians make lights of their own. From their first perceivable appearance via telescope as “a great light […] on the illuminated part [of Mars]”, to the flashes that indicate the launching of their cylinders, to those cylinders’ bright descents to the lights of their weapons and work (7), these lights act as indications of their civilization’s power. 

Secondly, the color red, so deeply associated with their planet, appears as a symbol of the Martians. The flashes from their planet are red, and their arrival on Earth immediately casts the narrator’s surroundings in a conspicuous redness, such as when the narrator and his wife prepare to leave their hometown: “The sun, shining through the smoke that drove up from the tops of the trees, seemed blood-red, and threw an unfamiliar lurid light upon everything” (46).