It’s shown in the analysis that: Nothing ends a fine night of socializing faster
than the "go home and think of your dead husband and your dozen abortions"
blast.
Now, let’s shift from
Fahrenheit 451
and smoothly move to
The Martian
Chronicles.
The language of this novel is rather romantic, very sensitive and sometimes
tender even. Here the author wanted to compare the life of our Earth and
impossible life on the Mars, to compare these two nations in order to
categorize people, to show the bitter similarity or amazing difference between
us, The Earth people and the Martians. This analysis should lead people to
realize their mistakes and to improve the situation on the Earth at least. The
first extract is
From "The Luggage Store"
"I know, we came up here to get away from things - politics, the atom bomb,
war, pressure groups, prejudice, laws -1 know. But it's still home there. You
wait and see. When the first bomb drops on America the people up here'll
start thinking. They haven't been here long enough. A couple years is all. If
they'd been here forty years, it'd be different, but they got relatives down
there, and their home towns." (132)

- 3 4 -
The store proprietor reasons correctly why the Mars settlers will return home in
the face of war on Earth. In doing so, he points out an inherent contradiction for
settlers and immigrants of all sorts: they leave their homes in order to escape all
the bad things and start anew, but as humans they still have roots and must pay
heed to those roots when they are threatened. One can head to a bold new future,
but the past is a powerful anchor for those who can still remember it.
From ’’The OffSeason”:
"Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something,
something - how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here's
Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin.
Come on, you Earth, send me your rocket!" (143)
Sam Parkhill not only desecrates the Martian landscape with his hot dog stand,
he does the same to the poem associated with the Statue of Liberty. With his
focus on personal benefit at the expense of all else - as well as the hubris to think
of Earth as his to exploit - he is the book’s clearest example of how man’s noble
quest for advancement can be corrupted and turned into something quite
different.
Earth changed in the black sky. It caught fire. Part of it seemed to come apart
in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an
unholy dripping glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled.
"What was that? " Sam looked at the green fire in the sky. "Earth," said Elma,
holding her hands together. (143)
This description of Earth finally succumbing to atomic war and humans on the
last march to self-destruction is typical Bradbury: simple declarative sentences
with a disarmingly mundane simile (the exploding jigsaw

- 3 5 -
puzzle) manages to convey an objective sense of the horror the Parkhills
witness, making it both vivid and oddly distant for the reader.


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- The Bible, Test, It, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Bear, Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man, Ray Douglas Bradbury, There Will Come Soft Rains