H.G. Wells must have heard the saying the grass is greener on the other side more than a few times in his life as he takes this idiom and runs with it. He creates a greener space in the parallel worlds of “The Country of the Blind.” Whether romanticizing about the world of the blind or that outside, Wells’ protagonist Nunez allows his imagination to distort reality and create a paradisiacal fantasy that can never be attained.
H.G. Wells introduces this tale with an unstable narrator who immediately admits “the rest of this story… is lost to me.”[1] The narrator establishes a temporal and physical lower world that is “somewhere over there”[2]. This is a story of an Other World with over a dozen versions altering and editing the facts. It is also one with unreliable citizens who revise reality to suit their collective condition of blindness. From the beginning, H.G. Wells is hinting to the reader that everything read, seen, or heard should not be trusted. Or rather, various versions of one narrative can exist.
These are tempting fictions that contain the possibility of a better life. The country of the blind is a paradise “with sweet water…slopes of rich brown soil…and great hanging forests of pine” [3] where Nunez can be king. The outside world is freedom where he can escape servitude.
It is only when Nunez enters these worlds that his absurd fantasies reveal themselves to be false. Despite various attempts, Nunez is never fully able to fit in with the blind citizens. He is punished for his difference and bullied into an irreversible surgical procedure. When he finally escapes to the outside of the valley wall, he becomes paralyzed with thoughts of the “Unexpected” and ultimately returns to the blind. Paradise is not so kind and freedom not so empowering.
By the end of the tale Nunez is again creating a fiction of the Other World. He imagines the outside world to have “stirring beauty, a glory of day…and a place of palaces and fountains...”[4]. However, this paradise is never reached. H.G. Wells ends the story in a state of suspension, where Nunez is laying under the vast sky in a space between worlds. The story will change the moment he enters this outside world. Reality will revise his narrative, adding to the multiple versions that already exist “somewhere over there.”
