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.
Themes
Technology and the Dysfunctional Family
From “The Veldt” to “The Rocket Man” to “Marionettes, Inc.,” technology rarely represents a positive force in family life. Notably, Bradbury’s depictions of familial strife do not stem from their futuristic setting. Many of his character’s problems are as familiar to readers today as they were to Bradbury’s audience in the 1950s. In “The Rocket Man,” a boy longs to be close to his distant, work-obsessed father. In “The Veldt,” children who are neglected by their parents turn to technology to fill the gap—and quickly become addicted. For Bradbury, technology does not create familial problems—it simply reveals and accelerates them.
Bradbury is especially interested in the frightening power of children. They have a potentially deadly combination of an active imagination and an underdeveloped sense of mortality. The latter is especially dangerous in conjunction with unlimited technological use. In both “The Veldt” and “Zero Hour,” parental disinterest allows children to interact with technology unsupervised—with deadly results. In “The Veldt,” George and Lydia Hadley hand over their responsibilities to a virtual reality nursery. The children come to view the nursery as a kind of pseudo-parent, as Lydia recognizes too late: “The house is wife and mother now and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot” (275).
Mrs. Morris in “Zero Hour” has suspicions about her daughter Mink’s Invasion! game, but the strongly delineated lines between adult life and childhood play do not allow her to investigate any further. While the grown-ups watch with envy as the children play—“jealous of the fierce energy of the wild tots, tolerantly amused at their flourishings, longing to join in themselves” (233)—an artificial barrier stands between them. Because Mrs. Morris refuses to communicate effectively with her child, Mink connects with someone else: an alien enemy of Earth.
There is, in fact, only one functional and healthy family unit in the collection: the Bodonis from “The Rocket.” Not coincidentally, they are also the family that is most comfortable with blurring the lines between adult and child. The children are mature and loving enough to refuse to go to Mars without the others. In turn, the children’s emotional needs are accommodated by a loving parent, who allows himself to act like a child on their simulated journey through the cosmos. Even in the depths of poverty, the family shares a life-changing experience via imaginative play, as made possible by technology.
Cultural Conflict and Consumerism
When Bradbury published The Illustrated Man in 1951, it was a time of unprecedented prosperity in America (at least for its white hegemonic class). After World War II ended in 1945, the US economy boomed as never before. More people had access to expensive goods and new technologies, ushering in an age of consumerism and consumption. The baby boom and suburban housing boom resulted in a healthy middle class. However, it was also a time of change and fear. The use of nuclear weapons against Japan had rattled the world, and fear of atomic annihilation would only ramp up as the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States intensified. The threat of communism gave rise to draconian political campaigns like McCarthyism, which sought to identify secret Soviet spies (often nonexistent) at every level of government. Meanwhile, a burgeoning civil rights movement revealed how little meaningful change had actually taken place after the American Civil War. At the top of the world, America feared it would be toppled from within.
These international and domestic anxieties are reflected in Bradbury’s fiction. Sometimes his stories turn the cultural conflict outwards. In “The Long Rain,” an American military squad marches through the rainforests of Venus. Readers are not told exactly what the Earthmen are doing there, but when they stumble on a ruined Sun Dome, its inhabitants drowned in the sea, it is clear the Venusians do not want them there. Bradbury warns against the dangers of American military intervention in foreign affairs. In other stories, Bradbury takes on the perspective of an “outsider” to American society—e.g., the black colony on Mars in “The Other Foot,” Hernando in “The Highway”—to criticize American culture. The best example of this is the collection’s most satirical story, “The Concrete Mixer,” in which an alien invasion is defeated not by American’s military might but by its insatiable consumer and media culture.
At other times, Bradbury reflects on domestic anxieties (like McCarthyism) by turning the camera inward. In some stories, Americans are not fighting foreigners; they are battling their own countrymen. In “The Fox and the Forest,” the United States is almost indistinguishable from its greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. Using secret police force called Searchers—which resemble the dreaded Soviet police, the KGB—America suppresses and kidnaps its own citizens. In “The Exiles,” Americans attack their own cultural heritage by evicting their greatest authors and even holidays.
For Bradbury, this mode of internal cultural conflict often takes the form of censorship, as it does in “The Exiles” and “The Concrete Mixer.” Book burning is a through-line in his fiction, especially Fahrenheit 451, whose title refers to the temperature at which paper catches on fire. Bradbury is concerned with both the destruction of free speech and the transportive imaginary power of fiction.
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