Like Dracula, then, and like Frankenstein’s demon, the Invisible Man ‘serves to displace the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society outside society itself’, in Franco Moretti’s formulation. ‘Professing to save the individual’, Moretti continues, the society that destroys the monster ‘in fact annuls him’.42 The Invisible Man represents a forensic attempt, in the specific conditions of the fin de siècle, to investigate the meanings of this annulation, or annihilation, or nihilation, of the individual subject.
