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• 1 media/IslandOfDrMoreau.jpg media/IslandOfDrMoreau.jpg 2023-03-01T07:15:19-08:00 The Island of Dr. Moreau - Summary 18 plain 2023-03-17T15:30:30-07:00      The Island of Dr. Moreau is about a man named Prendick who is shipwrecked and rescued by a ship carrying a variety of animals. Onboard the ship, he meets a former medical student named Montgomery and his assistant. When they arrive at an unnamed island, Montgomery unloads the animals but refuses to take Prendick. The ship’s captain refuses to let him stay and abandons him in a dinghy. Montgomery then takes pity and tows him ashore. There, he meets Dr. Moreau, who is secretive about the strange creatures on the island; he refers to it as “a biological station–of a sort” (Wells 22). Prendick realizes that Moreau is the notorious vivisector who had been banished from England after the public learned of his brutal experiments, and begins to put together the pieces of the isolated island, secretive doctor, and distorted beast-men. He believes that Moreau is experimenting on humans, and he may be next. He attempts to escape by running into the woods and meets an ape-man who brings him to the creatures’ forest home. There, they make him participate in a ceremony honoring ‘the Law’, a set of rules that Moreau instilled in the beast-men to make them act more human. The Law includes the threat of punishment, as well as a kind of deification of Moreau.
  
       When Moreau and Montgomery catch Prendick, Moreau tries to justify his actions of ‘playing God’ and Prendick is placated for the moment. Then Moreau sees evidence of the beast-men breaking the Law and calls a meeting to punish the culprit. When they confront the Leopard-man, Prendick kills it instead of letting Moreau experiment on it again. Then, one day, the puma Moreau was currently working on escapes and kills Moreau with its fetters when he attempts to recapture it. After realizing that the humans were not invincible, the beast-men decide to kill Montgomery when he’s drunk and vulnerable. Prendick attempts to maintain the illusion of a god to survive and befriends a dog-man to protect him. He sees the men slowly begin to revert to their original animal forms. Long after the deaths of Moreau and Montgomery, a boat with dead men in it washes up on shore. Prendick drifts in the ocean until a ship finds him and brings him back to London. He physically recovers but continues to be haunted by his time on the island and can’t handle the noise, people, and overall environment of the city. He doesn’t feel human anymore and lives the rest of his life trying to find peace with the “animal within” (Wells 115).