抄録
Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds has long been recognized not as a radio drama but as an incident in the history of media. On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a dramatization of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which tells the story of a Martian invasion in the “Breaking News” format. The show reportedly led many Americans to believe that Martians were really attacking, and caused a mass panic across the United States. While the broadcast became a historic event in the twentieth century, little has been discussed about the incident’s relationship to Orson Welles’s earlier experiment in radio drama, that is, the use of characters who tell their stories in “the first person singular” narrative. This essay closely examines the hitherto underrepresented role of Welles’s narrative experiment in War of the Worlds. Focusing on the historical context of the radio news in 1938, this essay clarifies how the “first person singular” technique is effectively used in radio drama.
