The Other Foot

Revenge and Empathy is a key theme in “The Other Foot.” However, the story is not structured like a revenge narrative. Classic revenge dramas such as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603) begin by presenting the reason for revenge. In these stories, the audience is either directly shown or explicitly told the protagonist’s reason for seeking revenge, and this revelation is the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion. For example, in Hamlet, the play begins with the appearance of the dead king’s ghost and his charge to Hamlet to avenge his murder. Hamlet’s quest for revenge is framed, at least initially, as an attempt to set things right.

“The Other Foot”, in contrast, does not begin with the racism that drives Willie to seek revenge. At the beginning of the story, that violence is well in the past; the Martians are living peaceful, ordinary lives when they hear of the impending arrival of the white man’s rocket. The children playing outside Hattie’s kitchen have never seen a white person and laugh incredulously at her descriptions of pale skin. They don’t understand why their parents want them to stay in the house and not see the visitor land. They were born into a world in which the violent racism that haunted their parents does not exist, and they have no concept of white people as a potential danger. Even Mr. Brown, an adult from Earth, admits he’s almost forgotten what white people are like. Mars, a flourishing society, suggests that self-destruction is not inevitable, and that perhaps societal flaws such as racism are to blame for the awfulness of life on Earth.

The grievance that drives Willie represents a problem that the Martians no longer have. Bradbury suggests that the present situation is an opportunity to prevent future violence; readers are therefore less likely to be disappointed by Willie’s failure to avenge his parents than they would be by Hamlet failing to avenge his father.

“The Other Foot” is also considerably more compressed in time than classic revenge dramas. A revenge quest like Hamlet’s may take days, weeks, or even years, but the events of “The Other Foot” happen in a single afternoon; the climax of the story takes only minutes. The story is structured around only a few locations, like the radio dramas Bradbury enjoyed as a child. Its most dramatic moments are confined in space like scenes in a stage play, and the language of the story is intensely visual.

Bradbury uses lyrical language. While other science-fiction stories of the period often read more like summaries or technical manuals, Bradbury was deeply influenced by his love of poetry, especially lyrical poets like Alexander Pope and Robert Frost. This lyricism obscures the precise nature of the situation at the beginning of the story: the opening describes the Martians as “the dark people,” looking up at the sky when the news of the rocket comes to them (Paragraph 1). The literally alien context of this paragraph—and the common practice in Golden Age science fiction of making all characters white by default—allows the reader to view the Martians as people first and as Black people second. It is only when Hattie Johnson appears by name, covering a pot of boiling soup, that readers understand that the characters on the ground are human beings. The reference to “Negro boys” in Paragraph 5 is the first confirmation that the darkness of “the dark people” is merely a reference to skin color.

Elsewhere in the story, Bradbury calls on poetic language to suggest deeper meaning behind relatively straightforward actions and expressions, and the idea of darkness takes on a new significance. Willie doesn’t merely find guns in his attic: Hattie sees “the brutal metal of them glittering in the black attic” (Paragraph 63), and Willie is described as “so dark” that Hattie can’t see him at all. References to the darkness of a character in a society where everyone has dark skin suggest that there is something uniquely and profoundly wrong with Willie. The darkness spreads and begins to take over the people in the crowd who listen to him; by the time the rocket lands, the people watching it are described as “marionette heads on a single string” (Paragraph 120).

Although about half the story is conveyed through dialogue, and the poetic passages of description form the heart of the story and carry many of its themes. Through Hattie, Bradbury explores Individual Versus Group Identity. She resists the impulse to join in with the crowd in attacking the white man, thinks of their hatred as a stone wall that can be collapsed if she only finds the right keystone (Paragraph 171).

Through Willie, Bradbury explores The Impact of Racism. When Willie reflects on the destruction of Greenwater, he summarizes it as “Nothing, nothing of it left to hate—not an empty brass gun shell, or a twisted hemp, or a tree, or even a hill of it to hate” (Paragraph 204). His vision of Earth is the aftermath of his father’s murder—the shells of the gunshots that killed him, the rope that that hung him from the tree, the tree itself and the hill on which it stood—and when that is gone, the source of his hatred quickly vanishes.

Bradbury alludes to works of religion and myth. He includes overt references like the white man’s offer to “humble ourselves in the sight of God” for the sins of Earth (Paragraph 167), as well as subtler allusions. When Willie remembers Earth, he recalls the large houses of wealthy white families in Greenwater as “white mortuaries” (Paragraph 204). This is most likely a reference to the “whited sepulchres” of the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible. In that passage, Jesus describes his critics, the Pharisees, as hypocrites, the equivalent of whitewashed tombs that look clean and wholesome on the outside but are full of decay within (Matthew 23:27). By linking the description of the houses to a Biblical metaphor for hypocrisy and corruption, Bradbury highlights what Willie truly resents about Greenwater without having to say it directly to the largely white audience.