The Martian Chronicles
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 motives to demonstrate the central conflicts between the human spirit and its environment in the East and West, which in the book is now Earth and Space, during the exploration and colonization of Mars.
Bradbury ...
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themselves using their shape shifting powers. Captain Black says, “Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I’m just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and through the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, that it frightens me. It’s too much like Green Bluff” The Martians have created a town so much like that of Green Buff Illinois that it’s uncanny, even to those who used to live there.
The Third Expedition’ is another improbable tale, but an effective horror story. Mars here provides the sort of fantastic background, which allows Bradbury to pull out all the stops and play with themes such as fantasy, nostalgia, magic illusion, and horror to his heart’s content. As is common in such tales, parallels to Bradbury’s own art are very close ...
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into Martians. Thus Mars gives man the chance to change places with his dream, if only in a sad and unexpected way.” (89) The Americans have an obsession with the past causes them to become oblivious to the future of Mars, which would have killed them all if a nuclear war had not broken on Earth, and it does kill the members of the Third Expedition. The only humans who do stay on Mars adapt to become the ‘New Martians,’ accepting the future and not remaining in the past. The Americans are given the choice of staying on the same fatal path or accepting what the Martian reality truly is. The third situation, the aftermath of the murder of the Third Expedition crew, is a Martian parade ...
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The Martian Chronicles. (2011, February 28). Retrieved April 27, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Martian-Chronicles/95344
"The Martian Chronicles." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Martian-Chronicles/95344>
"The Martian Chronicles." Essayworld.com. February 28, 2011. Accessed April 27, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Martian-Chronicles/95344.
"The Martian Chronicles." Essayworld.com. February 28, 2011. Accessed April 27, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Martian-Chronicles/95344.
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