PLOT DEVELOPMENT. In the framing narrative, an unnamed first-person narrator is on a walking tour in Wisconsin and describes a meeting with an “Illustrated Man” (no names are

In the framing narrative, an unnamed first-person narrator is on a walking tour in Wisconsin and describes a meeting with an “Illustrated Man” (no names are given). When the Illustrated Man takes off his shirt, the narrator sees tattoos, or illustrations, that cover his body, and the man tells him how each illustration tells a story.

The Illustrated Man claims that his stories predict the future. One spot on the Illustrated Man’s skin remains bare, but that spot will fill (temporarily) with information about the future of any person the man spends time with. The Illustrated Man warns the narrator not to look at the pictures, but he speaks as if he knows his warning will go unheeded. The narrator does watch the pictures, and sees eighteen tales enacted for him during the course of the night.

As arranged in the book, the eighteen tales are: “The Veldt,” “Kaleidoscope,” “The Other Foot,” “The Highway,” “The Man,” “The Long Rain,” “The Rocket Man,” “The Fire Balloons,” “The Last Night of the World,” “The Exiles,” “No Particular Night or Morning,” “The Fox and the Forest,” “The Visitor,” “The Concrete Mixer,” “Marionettes, Inc.,” “The City,” “Zero Hour,” and “The Rocket.”

The final section of the book describes what the narrator does when the stories stop: an image forms on the bare patch of the Illustrated Man’s back, an image of the Illustrated Man choking the narrator to death. The narrator leaves, running down a road in the dark toward a small town that he knows he can reach before morning.

Bradbury’s framing story serves to unify the narrative in two ways. First, the narrator experiences the stories in a single night and in a single location. Second, the Illustrated Man, a man too strange even for carnivals, links TIM to Bradbury’s gothic stories, a carnival universe often suffused with horror. In an interview, Bradbury contrasted his childhood fear of carnivals with his early love for magic and circuses: “Carnivals are a combination…. not always evil, but dangerous. And you sense carny people are not nice people. They get out of town just after they’ve done something dreadful…. Only when you’re older do you get some of the sexual overtones of carnivals” (Mogen 125). In Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury presents the fully developed view of the carnival as embodying an evil, dangerous, but seductive universe. His associations of carnivals with horror and death are clearly made in the framing story of TIM, and the individual stories can be read against those background associations.

A second element that unifies these stories is that they all present specific views of the future. The narrator, by the end, believes that the stories predict the future, as shown by his decision to run away when he sees the image of his murder. Since he is able to escape to a nearby town, his survival reveals that the predicted future can be averted by the right action: the future revealed by the stories is not inevitable. Since he has survived to tell us the tales he saw that night, readers know the Illustrated Man did not later track him down and kill him. So the stories are perhaps less predictions than warnings of what might come and what might be averted.

What view of the future is revealed to the narrator? Above all, it will be worse than the present, rather than better. TIM does not endorse the idea of progress or the notion that technology will create a better future. Of the eighteen stories, only two, “The Other Foot” and “The Rocket,” present a positive view of the future, and even these stories hardly qualify as optimistic. In the first, a third world war destroys Earth and only a few escape to the colonies on Mars, which have been settled completely by African Americans. In the second, the happy ending is gained by what amounts to a kind of virtual reality space ride, rather than actual travel to the stars. In the futures of TIM, technological progress does not solve humanity’s problems. At least six of the stories involve the end of the world by atomic bombs or some other human means.

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