The Martian Chronicles

Bradbury’s evocative language establishes the tonal atmosphere of nostalgia, wonder, and childlike awe which are woven throughout the novel. Though each of these aspects will take on sinister implications as the work progresses, in this first vignette they create a sense of dream-like excitement and surreal imagery.

The inversion of the seasons foreshadows the outsize power of the technologies of space-travel. In a literal sense, the melting snow and warm air speak to the sheer power of the rocket, a vision of technology which is more powerful than planetary cycles, powerful enough to physically change the world. A symbolic meaning follows: the blasts of warmth suggesting the end of a cold, dark age. It is also suggestive of the destructive nature of human belief, in that such a radical change must be made for any tangible progress to happen. This vignette presents an inverted depiction of life on Earth and prepares the reader for a world inverted: Mars.

Two primary symbols make their first appearance. At first, all the doors in the town are locked against the cold, suggesting a human disavowal of the world outside, and of each other, but the warmth of the rocket causes doors to fly open as people rush into the streets and symbolically embrace the next step of humankind. Fire is also strongly represented, though not in the way it will be utilized in the rest of the work. The connotation is positive here, the initiator of a new summer and the purest expression of the rocket’s power.

The setting of the story in Ohio suggests at one of Bradbury’s structural influences for The Martian Chronicles, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919).