The Portrayal of Powerlessness in Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Introduction

Sometimes the people a person loves change. At other times, this change is terrifying: a lover may turn cold towards his partner; parents may succumb to Alzheimer or dementia due to old change. Although people may look the same on the outside and their physical appearance does not change, inside they are vacant and they remember nothing. The saddest thing is that on most occasions, there is nothing that a person can do about all these things. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers portrays how helpless people can be.

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Written in 1955, Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney is the story about paranoia taken to its most extreme degree. On August 13, 1953, in northern California, in a small town called Santa Mira, a woman named Becky goes to the doctor's office of Miles Bennell, claiming that her cousin Wilma says her uncle Ira is not who she should be. He states that his behavior is totally different as if something or someone lived inside his body as if a strange force was manipulating him and was the owner of his strange behavior. This is the first case that reaches the ears of Dr. Bennell, but not the only one, as the days go by, more people make an appointment in their office, all with the message that one or more of their loved ones are not the same ones they knew until just a few days before. Mesmerized by the events that are taking place, he decides to contact Mannie Kaufman, a psychiatrist who asks for help in these particular cases.

As the days go by, Dr. Bennell, accompanied by Becky Driscoll, an old love of youth, and Jack and Teodora Belicec, a couple with whom Miles has been special friends for several years, find the enigma: some pods seem to be the cause of the strange phenomena that are taking place in the basements and closets of all Santa Mira homes. Now, the four friends have no doubt: they have been invaded by beings that escape their understanding and not a mysterious outbreak of mass hysteria as they originally thought. The pods are like a species of seeds that invaded Earth from space, after traveling great distances for thousands of years. They arrived at the planet by chance, as well as other points of the universe, but their purpose was to conquer the area where they had been deposited.

The truly mesmerizing thing about the invasion is that it takes place in such a way that it is practically impossible to discern the invader from the invaded, there are no spaceships, no monsters or aliens, lasers or mass destruction; only the substitution of a human for an identical one, which preserves its memories, its abilities and, in general, everything that distinguishes it from others, except its emotions. Victims are left powerless as the aliens in them control everything about them.

Powerlessness is a state where one does not have the ability to control what is going on. Powerlessness can also be defined as a state of mind where individuals feel they have no control over or effect on aspects or occurrences which affect their wellbeing, personal lives, or their actions. This is exactly what happens in the novel. The aliens take the bodies of the humans and control everything they do and think, leaving them powerless and helpless.

The people in the novel are not aware they are being replaced and they are no longer the original people. They continue with their lives without knowing that they are no longer the same. The invaders are aware of what they are and they make a perfect mimicry of the humans they eliminate.

Becky is worried about her cousin, who is convinced that her father is no longer her father. There is someone living in the house who is physically equal to him, who dresses like him, who has the same memories as his father, but who is not the real one, is an impostor. Becky's uncle is and is not the same person. It is logical that a single case like this is dismissed as an occurrence of madness. Then more people present themselves with the same problem: the firm belief that some relatives, some friends, some neighbors are no longer the originals. They claim to be the same, but they lack something, a shine of humanity in their eyes. Of course, even many cases like this can be dismissed as a collective hysteria in a community of few inhabitants. But the strange things happen and little by little the tests are accumulated by the truth: an extraterrestrial invasion, a sort of organisms of vegetal origin, are replacing little by little the human beings. Taking their places in society, organizing a large-scale alien invasion from within. The town falls into neglect as the invasion progresses. So that everything goes unnoticed, the place becomes increasingly inhospitable for the visitor: business closes, the streets stop fixing. The idea is to isolate, avoid resistance.

When Becky visits Miles, she tells him "She says he looks exactly like Uncle Ira, talks just like him, acts just like him-everything. She just knows it isn't Ira, that's all." (Chapter 1, page 1) ...This shows how mankind is powerless in stopping the invasion. The aliens are residing in bodies of normal people, controlling aspects of their lives and removing emotions from them. Emotions are what makes people human beings. Emotions do define people as humans and people 'feel' when they have emotions.

The aliens have invaded Santa Look, replacing its inhabitants with exact copies, sinister sines incapable of feelings or emotions, but perfectly trained for a mimetic representation of the originals, while they are asleep. And, of course, the peaceful population of Santa Mira is just the beginning, the beachhead of the invasion: the goal is to replace the entire human race in geometric progression. The aliens take the bodies of the humans and control everything they do and think, leaving them powerless and helpless.

Invasion of The Body Snatchers, like most of the best works of science fiction, exposes the reader to a series of concerns through allegory. The fact that the message has been maintained for more than half a century is a good example of its validity and the message it portrays. The invasion of the thieves of bodies proposes something subtler and transgressive: the loss not of the outer world but of a person's inner world, of the identity as human beings, and apparently everything remained the same but in reality, everything had changed. It was not the end of the world but "our" world.

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney, is a total science-fiction novel, in which the reader will enjoy, or rather, suffer together with its protagonists before a "peaceful" extraterrestrial invasion during which, and no doubt this is the most terrifying of fiction, we cannot ask for help from anyone (how to explain what is happening?) and in which we will have to fight for the survival of the human race, and even of all life on the planet, against enemies who not only want to conquer and dominate our world but who want to seize the most intimate of the human being.

Finney boasts a mastery of the extraordinary, very modern narrative "tempo". The chapters, brief, end always at the right time, leaving the reader hanging and with the need to continue reading. An early and successful cliffhanger. In addition, the language is agile and nothing tiresome, which rushes the reader without brakes towards the end of the book, which is short. These doses of action do not make it a book lacking a certain scientific rigor. Quite the opposite. The scientific-fictional reasons that Finney brings are convincing, whether through psychology first, when credit is subtracted from the phenomenon or from botany and biology later, when the origin of the replication apocalypse is sought in some space pods, referring to plausible and accepted theories (in those moments at least) about the very origin of life on Earth. The only "but" would be in the outcome: the ending is abrupt and hasty, unworthy of the rest of the work.

But despite this, the work is worthwhile and deserves each and every one of the praises that Stephen King has dedicated to him, which he considers that laid the foundations for the modern horror novel. The book is written in the middle of the fifties, and it shows. It is noted by many factors. A reader will encounter a book containing paragraphs of a racism and especially a palpable machismo, written at a time light years of our current era of inane political correctness. Racism and machismo perhaps even more offensive to our mentality by innate: they are completely inherent to all the characters, who practice it with a faith born of practice. Quite simply, everyone knows their place, and nobody does anything to discuss it. And less than anyone, the aliens, copies of ourselves even in the bad. Even the heroine takes advantage of it, precisely on the only occasion when she stops being the damsel in trouble to do something more useful than running, screaming or cuddling in the arms of the hero wishing that things are not as they are.

Works Cited

Jack, Finney. "Chapter One - Invasion of The Body Snatchers." Pereiti Na Glavnuiu Stranicu, www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/111749/1/Finney_-_Invasion_of_The_Body_Snatchers.html.