A dark comedy, The Invisible Man has attained the stature of a modern myth in part because it addresses fundamental problems of Western civilization.

What price should people pay for knowledge? How much knowledge is too much? Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe addressed these questions in The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (1592), in which a learned man sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge. Faustus uses his new powers for self-gratification. Having the knowledge of the universe at his command, he merely satisfies his animal desires. At the end, he despairs of salvation, having wasted his native intellectual powers.

The character Faust reappears in many forms after Marlowe. German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) investigates the blessing and curse of being at once an intellect capable of noble achievements and an animal given to base desires. A more modern...