The Illustrated Man

Bradbury is fascinated with death and often writes characters facing the ephemerality of existence. Sometimes death is imminent, as in “Kaleidoscope” and “The Last Night.” Other times, it is drawn out to some point in the uncertain future, as in “The Visitor” and “The Long Rain.” For Bradbury, who is interested in the human condition and who people really are, death is a useful rhetorical scalpel. It is the single greatest threat faced by any human being and thus has a way of stripping human psychology down to its most basic, primal instincts.

Considering death also spotlights its negative: life. Facing the end, characters in stories like “Kaleidoscope” and “The Visitor” look back and wonder what constitutes a life well lived. In “Kaleidoscope,” Hollis, a man prone to selfishness and anger, realizes at the very end that what truly matters is mattering to someone else. In “The Visitor,” terminally ill Saul does not embrace human compassion until too late, when his selfishness has killed the one person who could ease his remaining time. Though the outcomes are often tragic, important philosophical revelations for Bradbury’s characters would not be possible without death looming on the horizon.

In this way, Bradbury’s characters suffer so the reader does not have to.