84 pages • 2 hours read
Ray BradburyThe Illustrated Man
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Story 11
Story 11 Summary: “The Fox and the Forest”
William and Susan Travis watch fireworks at an October festival in Mexico, 1938. Susan worries that they might be discovered, but Travis is confident they will never be found. In a café, Susan notices an unusual man who is drinking from several different bottles of alcohol and smoking different cigars and cigarettes. She is worried he might be a Searcher, sent from the year 2155 to track them down and bring them back.
The couple’s real names are Ann and Roger Kristen. They took a vacation to the past with a company called Travel in Time, Incorporated, fleeing their jobs at a bomb factory and a bio-weapons facility. In the future, the government sought to “burn [their] books, censor [their] thoughts, scald [their] minds with fear, march [them], scream at [them] with radios” (153).
Susan is convinced the mysterious café man must be a Searcher, recalling her and William’s first nights in the past when they, like him, sampled everything they could get their hands on. The man introduces himself to them as Simms, the chief of the Searchers, and makes his suspicions clear. As they leave, he says one phrase: “2155 AD.”
Back in their hotel room, Susan is terrified, convinced that their odd mannerisms have given them away, but William is angry. He is determined to wander constantly and hide in crowds, as the Searchers cannot nab them in public. That night, the phone rings. A voice says “The rabbits may hide in the forest, but a fox can always find them” (156). Susan has nightmares about her disease experiments in the future.
In the morning, an American motion picture company arrives in the town square. William decides they can blend in with them to avoid Simms. At breakfast, they chat with the friendly director, Joe Melton. He is outgoing and warm, but while Melton is distracted, Simms interrupts. He reminds William and Susan that they cannot escape and makes them a deal: no punishment if William comes back quietly to work on the hydrogen-plus bomb. William suggests that he could return to the future if it means Susan can stay in the past. Simms agrees. As Susan watches from the balcony, William runs over Simms with their car.
The locals believe William’s story that it was an accident. Melton invites the two of them for drinks while their car is being repaired. He suggests that Susan could star in a movie he is making. Susan is amenable, but Melton’s proposed plot for the film mirrors the couple’s real life and escape, revealing that he and the rest of the film crew are Searchers too. Before the locals can burst in and save them, the Searchers take William and Susan back to the future. The locals are baffled by their disappearance and unsure what to do with the trove of liquor and cigarettes the Searchers left behind.
Story 11 Analysis
“The Fox” represents another Bradbury-ian twist on a dystopian future and the threat of nuclear war. Here, Bradbury takes America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union to a new extreme. In its ramped-up attempts to defeat an unnamed enemy, the United States has become a totalitarian society itself. It is building improved nuclear weapons and bio-weapons, as well as policing and enslaving its own citizens. The incognito Searchers evoke McCarthyism’s fears about secret Soviet spies walking among American citizens, but like the literary figures in “The Exiles,” William and Susan are pursued not by foreigners but by their own countrymen.
The names Bradbury chooses for his protagonists are of interest. The historical William Barret Travis was a 19th-century lawyer and soldier. He is considered a hero of the Texas Revolution and died as the chief commander at the Battle of the Alamo. It is unlikely that this reference is coincidental; William’s daughter was named Susan, like the female protagonist of “The Fox.” In an ironic twist, the Travises seek refuge in Mexico—the historical Travis’s enemy—and Mexican culture is seen as vibrant, refreshing, and beautiful, rather than backwards and primitive. It is, quite literally, a vacation for the Americans. The Mexican people themselves welcome the Travises with open arms. They are wholly willing to accept and even protect them. They believe the couple’s story about the killing of Simms being an accident, and when it is clear the Travises are in trouble, the mayor even to break into the room to save them.
The antagonists are the Travises’ fellow Americans, Joe Melton and Mr. Simms. Simms, too, may reference a real-life historical figure. William Gilmore Simms was a popular writer and politician of the antebellum American South. A fire-eater, or quarrelsome man, he supported the pro-slavery movement and criticized abolitionist novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the same way that the historical Simms championed the plantation lifestyle—in which a patriarchal master controlled the life and death of his slaves—so Bradbury’s Simms enforces an unjust and evil system. Interestingly, the 1950s and 60s saw the rise of a pro-Simms movement. It protested the widespread censorship of the man’s novels based on his pro-slavery and secessionist views. Interestingly, while Bradbury is usually a vocal opponent of censorship, he makes his position on Simms clear. His Simms character is an irredeemable villain, and Bradbury invites little sympathy from his reader over Simms’s death.
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