H.G. Wells's novel The Island of Dr. Moreau is presented as a report by a man who lived through the story, a man who was shipwrecked and who found himself on a strange and uncharted island in the Pacific, and who discovered there a man named Dr. Moreau who was conducting god-like experiments turning animals into near-humans. Underlying this story is Wells's view toward the idea of human progress and his belief that hymn beings are much closer to the animal kingdom than humans like to admit. A number of elements in the story are satiric, turning actual human foibles and social attitudes into fodder for parody and inversion.
The main character, Prendick, begins by misunderstanding what he sees on the island, believing that Moreau is turning human beings into some kind of animals. He sees Moreau conducting an operation and assumes the being on the operating table is a man:
I was convinced now, absolutely assured, that Moreau had been vivisecting a human being. . . These creatures I had seen were the victims of some hideous experiment! (51).
Prendick himself reacts in a somewhat animalistic fashion to the horrors he sees, for rather than reasoning out the reality and what he should do about it, he turns and runs, in effect returning both literally and figuratively to the jungle each time:
I ran furiously up the slope, over it, then turned eastward along a rocky valley, fringed on either side with jungle. . . There I remained for a long time, too fearful to move, and indeed too fearful even to plan a course of action (52).
The repeated recitation of the Law becomes a list of terrible actions which presumably men would never take but which animals would, and the animals repeat after each law, "Are we not men?" Of course, they are not, but Moreau is trying to make them into men. What he is doing goes against nature in several ways. Not only has he altered the physical form of the creatures on the island, but he is tr...