Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles
Uploaded by london28 on Dec 10, 2004
Ray Bradbury is a twentieth century writer. Two themes, common times and the American spirit characterize Bradbury’s book. Bradbury contrasts these two themes and creates irony throughout the book. Bradbury uses most of the book to show the adaptation of Americans to the planet Mars, and how they strive to avoid the ways of the past, and yet can never quite escape it. In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury uses his examinations of common times and the American spirit as central motifs to demonstrate the central conflicts between the human spirit and its environment in the East and West, now Earth and Space, during the exploration and colonization of Mars.
Bradbury demonstrates the common times by examining the American past and the Martian future. Bradbury illustrates the American past by showing the reader wonderful things that apparently occur in the past. Bradbury describes the image of Green Bluff, Illinois in chapter 6 as the first wonderful thing the Earthmen find. “The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further upon the green stood a tall, brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and yellow and green colored glass…Through the front window you could see a piece of music entitled “Beautiful Ohio.” This description of a quaint American house shows how welcoming this town looks. The description sounds like a turn of the century American novel. The men of the Third Expedition find a town the Captain John Black describes as “peaceful and cool.” It’s described further as “The sky was serene and quiet, and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and three shadings of a ravine. Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted by.” Bradbury details a small town in the Midwest in 1926; the ideal image of home for most people. A place where everybody knows everyone else’s name. “One of the most potent images in The Martian Chronicles is the image of Green Bluff, Illinois, It is especially the dream of the American boy, sentimentalized in the style of a Norman Rockwell painting, filled with benign parental figures, cold lemonade, and green lawns, all of which posses a remarkable attraction in Bradbury’s fiction.” In fact, the travelers cannot overcome, the...