224 Bradbury, Ray
has something to do with knowledge, respect, and
a deep belonging, as Spender had sensed intuitively
during his first evening on Mars. Without that
belonging, he explains, all naming is alien, and all
touching will fall short of communion. He predicts,
“No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch
it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what
we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change
it to fit ourselves.” Yet Spender’s actions illustrate his
own description of failed love. He lacks a connec-
tion both to the Martian culture and to the coarse
Earth culture represented by his fellow astronauts.
The resultant lack of connection breeds his actions
of anger, violence, and destruction. He shows us that
with a failed love, violence can erupt between people
and places and, as seen above with the Ks, between
people and people.
Bradbury also illustrates the loneliness generated
by the loss of true love. It can create such a cavern-
ous need that LaFarge in “The Martian” chooses to
increase another’s loss in order to assuage his own.
He stands at the balcony and consciously takes
another man’s “daughter” in order to regain his “son.”
This need traps the Martian Tom, tearing him apart
and destroying his identity. The Martian cannot be
the beloved for all people. His very responsiveness
assures his destruction. And in “April 2026: The
Long Years,” grief for his dead family leads Hatha-
way to create sophisticated substitutes to fill his
loneliness. Love is a necessity. Lacking the reality
of a family, he needs facsimiles in order to survive.
Yet love is also powerful beyond measure. As
Janice finds out in “The Wilderness,” love is all one
needs to leave behind everything that one knows
and take a risky one-way trip to another planet.
Love can overthrow a crew of 16 men, all logical and
highly trained, by immersing them in the relative
nostalgia of their childhood and offering them the
return of their lost loves. It overcomes training, logic,
and habituation; it can destroy you or it can, as at the
end of the book, seed a new world.
Bradbury thus leaves us with a sense of hope.
In the early part of the book, Spender stands in
a ruined city, by moonlight, and pronounces that
“Love itself must rest.” Throughout the book, Brad-
bury shows us the pause of love, both on a planetary
and an interpersonal level. Yet by the end of the
book, we have come full circle. It is again nighttime,
and we are in yet another ruined city. However, now
the face of the boy becomes like an old Martian
mask, and he is not in a dying marriage but part of a
young, harmonious family, in touch with each other
and the world around them. They have let go of the
past (having burned their Earth maps and destroyed
their rocket) and moved fully into the present with
each other. They are not trying to change the planet
into a replica of their past. They merge with it and
allow themselves to be transformed by it, becom-
ing the new Martians. Love is thus expanded from
romantic to familial to planetary. Despite the warped
foolishness, the loss, the stupidity, the violence, and
the pain that characterize many human-human and
human-planet interactions, Bradbury leaves us with
the hope that love, like the survival of the human
species, is still possible.
Anna Minorenature in The Martian Chronicles
Nature plays a prominent role in Ray Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles. It illustrates the vastness of the
planet Mars, indicates the harmony and disharmony
of the characters’ interactions with that planet, and
gives the reader hints about the emotional state of
the characters themselves. Bradbury thus uses his
descriptions of nature as a literary technique: They
are not random descriptions of a foreign planet but
instead provide valuable information about the char-
acters and their fates.
For example, Bradbury’s descriptions of nature
indicate the vastness of the planet. Humans are
dwarfed in it. Sam Parkhill’s one lone hotdog stand
is an outpost of commercialism within the dusty
plains. Mr. Hathaway staves off madness by search-
ing the huge night skies for a single red rocket flare.
Jose drives along a dark country road until he feels
like he is lost in time, as if time swallows him up
whole along with the singing insects and the one
(huge) insect he encounters bearing a Martian on
its back. Time, space, and size are stretched to such
huge proportions that human beings are literally
lost within them. Benjamin cannot breathe properly,
either because the air is too thin or because it almost
drips with thick greenness. The seeds he plants grow
a century’s worth of earthtime in just a few minutes.