CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Seventeen of the eighteen stories are told in the third-person point of view, and each story focuses on a different protagonist, or main character. In a third-person narrative, one character is usually the main point of view character. Short stories do not allow as much development of character as do longer narratives, and more character development occurs through dialogue and description of actions than through in-depth descriptions of characters’ thoughts and emotions. Stories also tend to focus on conflict between the main character and other characters.

In most of the stories in The Illustrated Man, the conflict between characters is described as the different perspectives between two groups of characters, rather than through a close focus on one or two individuals as is the case in three of the stories. In those three stories, the main character or characters embody a different perspective on events. “The Highway” focuses on Hernando, a Mexican peasant who earns a marginal living by farming and by scavenging the castoffs of the well-off tourists he watches drive north. On this particular day, his green and life-filled field is the setting for the news of an atomic war. The fleeing tourists insist that the end of the world has come, but through Hernando, readers see growth and life outside the cities of North America, which are destroyed.

Another story with a close focus on individual characters is “No Particular Night or Morning.” This story focuses on Hitchcock and Clemens, part of a crew on a rocket far from Earth. The names of the characters evoke Alfred Hitchcock, the famous film director, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). The central conflict of the story is between the two men’s different perspectives on their situation, and the story is structured around a series of debates between them. Hitchcock is rapidly descending into an extreme solipsism, a condition in which he refuses to believe in the existence of anything outside himself, including Earth or other members of the crew. Clemens and the others try to intervene, but Hitchcock eventually kills himself by exiting the ship—in a spacesuit, however, which seems to show he has some sense of the material reality of space. Clemens is left alone, thinking of Hitchcock alone in space.

“The Fox and the Forest” describes a couple dealing with the end of their world. In this story, Roger Kristen and his wife, traveling under the assumed names of William and Susan Travis, try to escape from their time, a future in which all resources are devoted to an immense and destructive war effort. Their future has the technology for time travel, but restricts its use to vacations. The couple remain in 1938 Mexico, and kill a Searcher who came after them, but they are tricked by a group of American actors who are also Searchers, and are taken back to the future to help fight the war.

The characters in five stories are family members: children and parents in “The Veldt,” “The Rocket Man,” “The Last Night of the World,” “Zero Hour,” and “The Rocket,” and married couples in “Marionettes, Inc.” “The Veldt” presents an extremely negative view of the effect of technology on a family. George and Lydia Hadley have tried to give their children, Wendy and Peter, the best of everything, including a holographic nursery that is part of a completely automated house. George becomes nervous and tries to restrict the time the children are spending in the nursery. The children, whose names evoke James Barrie’s Never-Never Land, have begun eliciting violent and destructive programming instead of the pleasant childhood fantasies their parents expected of them. The conflict leads the children to set up their parents to be eaten by the nursery’s lions.

The families in the other stories also have problems associated with technology. In “The Rocket Man,” a father absent because of his job in space is eventually killed in an accident, leaving his wife and son alone. “The Last Night of the World” describes a family representative of all the families on Earth. The adults have realized, through a universal dream message, that the world is coming to an end, and they quietly accept it, going about their daily business and then going to bed without telling their children anything. “Zero Hour” focuses on one family, Mrs. Morris, her daughter Mink, and her friends. During the course of an afternoon, Mink tells her mother all about “Invasion,” a new game, but the mother does not take it seriously. Only at the end does she realize that the invasion is real and that the children have been participating happily, setting up the conditions which allow an actual force of unnamed and never fully described aliens to invade Earth.

“Marionettes, Inc.” focuses on Braling and Smith, married men spending a night out together. They begin discussing problems in their marriages, but Braling has a solution: a marionette that is exactly like him. He plans to use the marionette to take a vacation in Rio without his wife’s knowledge. Smith plans to get a marionette as well, but when he returns home and looks at his bankbook, he discovers ten thousand dollars (the price of a marionette) is gone and that his “wife” is ticking. Braling, returning home, finds himself completely replaced by the marionette Braling, who has fallen in love with Mrs. Braling and plans to take her to Rio after shoving the human Braling into a storage box.

Only “The Rocket” offers a family who love and are happy with each other. The father, Fiorelle Bodoni, is a junkman who takes a discarded rocket model and creates a virtual tour of the solar system. He takes his children on a wondrous tour, and is left at the end, promising to take his wife on her own trip a little later.

Four stories focus on characters who face conflicts between people from different cultures. In “The Other Foot,” Bradbury describes a Mars that differs from his other Mars stories: in this story, African Americans left Earth in the 1960s and colonized Mars. The main point of view character in this story is Hattie Johnson, who left Earth in 1965 as a small girl. Some twenty years later, a grown woman married to Willie Johnson and a mother, she sees the arrival of a rocket bringing a white man from Earth. As in The Martian Chronicles, an atomic war has left millions of people dead, especially in cities. The survivors, about half a million, have sent the man to plead with the colonists for rescue. The first impulse of some of the African-American characters is to impose a racially based segregation, Jim Crow in reverse, on the white survivors. Hattie asks the man whether the place where Willie’s father was lynched remains, and he shows her evidence that the town and its inhabitants were destroyed; only then does the mood change. The story ends with Willie proclaiming that everyone is equal, now that the majority of Earth’s population has been destroyed.

Martian and human cultures conflict in “The Concrete Mixer,” a story told from the point of view of a Martian, Ettil, who is part of an invasion of Earth. Ettil is reluctant to go; he has read so much of Earth’s science fiction about failed Martian invasions that he is sure that humans have a sense of inevitable victory. Ettil’s perceptions are critical both of his own people, who forced him to join the Legion of War, and of the Earth men and women who welcome them to Earth and then wear the Martian invaders down between the grindstones of feminine attention and the mass media. Since Ettil is the point of view character, readers share his thoughts and feelings about the other characters.

“The City” relates another conflict between an alien race and humans. Left by a dead race who was wiped out by the distant ancestors of humans, the city is the only remnant of this species, and is programmed to recognize and destroy the enemy and then die.

The same sense of inevitable doom, carried out by technology, surfaces in the conflict between literary and mythic characters and visiting humans in “The Exiles.” In this story, Mars has become a refuge for fantastic characters from literature and myth and for the writers of such stories. The story’s point of view moves back and forth between the literary and mythic characters and the human men approaching the planet in a rocket. Writers from Shakespeare to Poe and mythic characters such as Santa Claus have fled from the rational society on Earth, where most of their books and stories have been destroyed, to live on Mars. When a rocket arrives from Earth, the characters and authors try to destroy the men on the ship, but fail. After landing, the captain burns the last copies of the books he has brought from Earth, symbolizing their commitment to “science and progress” (104). The burning of the last copies finally destroys the apparently immortal creators and creations of literature and legend.

Five of the stories focus on groups of men who serve together in an organization or institution. The priests in “The Fire Balloons” (also printed in The Martian Chronicles) disagree on the nature of their mission and what sort of sin they will find on Mars. The conflict between Father Peregrine and Father Stone, the two major characters, is resolved when they become acquainted with the blue globes of fire who are the “Old Martians.” Since the Old Ones have given up physical life, sins, specifically sins of the body, cannot occur.

“The Visitor” describes what happens to a group of quarantined men on Mars. Exiled because of a disease called “blood rust,” they lead limited lives. When a man named Leonard Mark, who has the ability to create visions that seem real to all human senses, arrives in camp, the men quarrel over who should have his “services.” Saul, the protagonist, does not want to share Mark with the other men, and in the ensuing fight they kill Mark.

The characters in “Kaleidoscope” are doomed at the beginning of the story because their rocket has blown up. Although they are in their space suits, they have no chance of rescue. All they can do is talk to each other by means of the radios in their suits for a limited time. The story focuses on Hollis, the main point of view character, who realizes he is headed toward Earth. All the characters move through fear, helplessness, and anger. The Captain tries to restore order by giving commands, but the men no longer accept his authority. Hollis’s coming to terms with the quality of his life and what it means to die is paralleled by the other men starting to see more beauty around them. Hollis’s final realization is of the beauty of the universe, the individuality of each person’s journey, and the hope that he can make up for his past life. At the end of the story, the point of view shifts to a small boy in Illinois seeing a “falling star” that the reader knows is Hollis’s body entering the atmosphere.

Another kind of death, spiritual death, is explored in “The Man,” a story in which an expedition from Earth lands on an inhabited planet only to find that its arrival is of little interest to the inhabitants. When the crew is told that a “remarkable man,” described in ways that evoke Jesus Christ, had just appeared in the city, the Earth men quarrel over whether the appearance of this man is a hoax, a hallucination, or a genuine Visitation. Captain Hart becomes obsessed with travelling on to other worlds and catching up with the man, but Martin, and most of the crew, stay behind because they realize they have found what they sought. “The Long Rain” tells the story of a military unit on Venus searching for shelter. They are engaged in a war with an enemy that is never clearly described or named. The men, mostly referred to by rank instead of name, must find a Sun Dome for shelter from the unending rain. Only the lieutenant survives to find a working dome, and in the end he could be merely hallucinating the shelter.

Besides the framing story, only one story is told in a first-person narrative and contains more of a psychological description and development of the narrator and protagonist: the seventh story, “The Rocket Man.” The narrator in this story is a boy named Doug whose father is a Rocket Man, gone from Earth for three months at a time. Doug lives with his mother leading a life that seems to revolve around the short times his father returns, but he plans to go to space like his father. The narrator’s name recalls Douglas Spaulding in Dandelion Wine (and Douglas is Bradbury’s own middle name). The family lives in Green Village, a variation of Green Town, Bradbury’s fictionalized hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. The son tells what it is like waiting for his father to return and the glory of his father’s job. When his father dies, pulled into the Sun, Doug’s mother responds by shutting out daylight and the Sun—and pulls her son as well into a life where they try very hard never to see the Sun.

The central characters in most of the stories are humans. In the one exception, “The Concrete Mixer,” the point of view character is a Martian named Ettil, who is reluctantly persuaded to join an invasion of Earth. The story presents a humorous take on the “Mars Invasion” when the humans first surrender, then overwhelm the invading army with adulation, feminine attention, and the media. Bradbury’s alien character allows him to give an outsider’s view of American capitalist media culture. In this darkly comic story, the Martian invasion fails because America welcomes the invaders and essentially swallows them. Ettil writes home about the horrors of the American automobiles and cinema that eventually kill him, foretelling the destruction of the invading army.

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