84 pages • 2 hours read
The Illustrated Man
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Symbols & Motifs
Death
Bradbury is fascinated with death and often writes characters facing the ephemerality of existence. Sometimes death is imminent, as in “Kaleidoscope” and “The Last Night.” Other times, it is drawn out to some point in the uncertain future, as in “The Visitor” and “The Long Rain.” For Bradbury, who is interested in the human condition and who people really are, death is a useful rhetorical scalpel. It is the single greatest threat faced by any human being and thus has a way of stripping human psychology down to its most basic, primal instincts.
Considering death also spotlights its negative: life. Facing the end, characters in stories like “Kaleidoscope” and “The Visitor” look back and wonder what constitutes a life well lived. In “Kaleidoscope,” Hollis, a man prone to selfishness and anger, realizes at the very end that what truly matters is mattering to someone else. In “The Visitor,” terminally ill Saul does not embrace human compassion until too late, when his selfishness has killed the one person who could ease his remaining time. Though the outcomes are often tragic, important philosophical revelations for Bradbury’s characters would not be possible without death looming on the horizon.
In this way, Bradbury’s characters suffer so the reader does not have to. One function of the “what-if” nature of speculative fiction is allowing the reader to place him- or herself into the text. By exploring his characters’ reactions to the greatest unknown of all—death—Bradbury hopes his reader, too, can experience catharsis.
Psychiatry/Psychology
Bradbury is distrustful of psychology and psychiatry (which he uses interchangeably). As a weaponized arm of logic, psychological analysis is used by villainous characters to suppress and brainwash others. In “The Exiles,” when Smith sees Oz’s Emerald City collapsing—an unbelievable but true event—his captain orders him to report for psychoanalysis. A psychological block even prevents William and Susan Travis from asking for help from people in the past in “The Fox and the Forest.”
When psychology is not being used for evil outright, it can be useful in identifying a problem, but it never offers a sufficient solution. In “The Veldt,” the child psychologist David McClean instantly recognizes that the children’s fantasies are dangerous and even currently diagnoses the family as tech-dependent. However, the story ends with McClean out on the savannah himself, duped by the children and unaware of what happened to George and Lydia as a vulture circles overhead. Similarly, in “No Particular Night,” the ship psychiatrist understands Hitchcock’s philosophical problem, but Clemens quickly recognizes that no doctor will be able to fix Hitchcock, as they cannot treat the source of his existential dread. For Bradbury, this is a job better handled by imaginative activity rather than logic.
Witches
Bradbury loves witches. In some stories, their presence makes sense in the mythology of the world. For example, in the meta-literary universe of “The Exiles,” literature’s most famous coven, Macbeth’s trio of witches, weaves a spell to bring down the astronauts. In other stories, the inclusion of witches is less expected or explained. In “The Concrete Mixer,” for example, witches act as a kind of police force for the Martian government to chide political dissidents. Most incongruously of all, the time-traveling witch in “The Illustrated Man” is a Wisconsin tattoo artist.
In every story, though, a narrative function of Bradbury-ian witches is clear. They add a garish, in-your-face element of the fantastical. While some magical realism authors lean closer into the realism side of the equation, Bradbury hefts all his weight into magic. No uncanny valley subtlety here; Bradbury wants his reader firmly rooted in the outlandish weirdness of his worlds.
In their metaphorical connotations, witches also embody many of the lessons Bradbury is trying to impart to his reader. Witches seldom give without taking something in return; technology functions in much the same way. Both offer incredible power to the man wise enough to use them correctly.
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By Ray Bradbury
