Essay Questions

Does the story of the Illustrated Man succeed in convincingly tying the collection of short stories together?

In order to shape eighteen disparate short stories together, Bradbury makes use of a frame device to provide context for each story in the view of a larger whole. It could be argued that this device is contrived and unsuccessful; it provides a scintillating introduction, but the likelihood of an entire story being conveyed with the inner monologues of characters on a small patch of skin is not considerable. The stories sometimes overlap, but there isn't a lot of consistency between them in terms of subject matter or style.

On the other hand, it can be imagined that these stories are magically conveyed. The message of The Illustrated Man is in favor of imagination; perhaps the use of imagination in interpretation is key. All of the stories are similar in that they involve much imagination and a preoccupation with the nature of reality; in this sense, the body of the Illustrated Man is the perfect canvas for these tales of the beautiful and grotesque.

Is the message of "The Long Rain" hopeful or despairing?

At first glance, it might seem that "The Long Rain" is a story about despair and hopelessness. The astronauts are stranded on Venus, a foreign planet, and subjected to an environment of ceaseless, torrential rain that leeches the color from the world and causes the men to suffer horrible fates. One man gives up and walks out into the rain, never to be seen again, and another shoots himself to escape the torment. The first Sun Dome the adventurers come to, moreover, is broken and unable to be used.

The real message of this story, though, is one of perseverance. When all the others succumb to despair, the lieutenant continues to press on, hopeful in spite of the overwhelming evidence that he has no chance of survival. In the end, he finds a functioning Sun Dome, which saves his life and protects him from the terrors of the Long Rain. It is a cautionary tale, but ultimately a hopeful one.

What is the message of "The Other Foot?"

"The Other Foot" is a story about racism. A colony of African-Americans has been sent from Earth and is now living on Mars. When they hear of white men who are coming to land in their settlement, they enact an ironic reversal of Jim Crow, building the town in such a way that segregation targets white people in retribution for what the African-Americans had to suffer while on Earth. When the other people arrive, however, they discover that they all have shared experiences and tragedies in common, forcing them to recognize their common humanity. In the end, the segregation is ended, and all people live together as equals. Bradbury's message, a rather unpopular one among the white populace in 1951, is that, regardless of skin color, all men should be treated equally because of their shared humanity.