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Analyzing Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles'

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The Chronicles of Destructive Frontiersmen
Critic Roland Barthes has said, “Literature is the question minus the answer.” Choose a novel, or play, and, considering Barthes’ observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers answers. Explain how the author’s treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary

“” In Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, many questions are raised as more things happen to the Red Planet and its inhabitants. Possibly most essential to the work as a whole; is humanity inherently good? Bradbury uses irony, repetition, and other literary devices to lead the reader into analyzing the world and how …show more content…

They stopped where we should’ve stopped a hundred years ago”(Bradbury 87). In this quote, Spender, a crewmember on a Mars exhibition, explains how good the Martian society was, saying the humans should look up to them. In previous chapters, Bradbury takes the reader through multiple Martian societies, each proving to be more advanced than the earth men’s. In one, the Martians display ingenious forms of telepathy. Bradbury shows the reader the advancement of the Martians using comparisons and dialogue between characters the reader has sympathy and trust in. Although Bradbury uses the rocketships to show how earth is drastically improving their technology, he hints that the earth’s society is in no way as wonderful as the Martian society. The reader begins to show sympathy toward the Mars inhabitants, even though various Mars excursions proved to be deadly for the earth men at the hands of the martians. Bradbury’s point of view is shown through the stories of suffering martians, such as the martian who wanted to be everybody’s lost love, but could not because he could not please everybody and eventually died from trying. These stories plant in the reader a sense of apology toward the martians, giving a more jaded view of the invading earth men hoping to colonize the once magnificent

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While talking to the captain about human’s destructive nature, Spender said, “‘...we’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.’” (54). Bradbury criticizes the haughty human behavior and their feeling of superiority which leads to an abundance of pride, causing their destructive personality to surface. This supports Bradbury’s argument that ideal frontiersmen are people who appreciate an unknown environment along with it’s native culture by adapting to it rather than changing it. Moreover, Bradbury compares the current condition of Earth to what he believes is the future of Mars, in order to convey the violence that humans have exposed to the environment in “The Million Years Picnic”.

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The ravenous desire for dominance of everything around them that people often possess provides impetus to them sparking conflict between others and among themselves. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles explores the possibilities of how destructive human behavior could be, and the potential conflict it can cause, as well as alluding to incidents of such behavior causing conflict between others in the past. The novel tells stories of exploration to new lands causing fierce animosity between explorers and the indigenous people who live there. Likewise, the story in Bradbury’s novel called The Earth Men depicts a crew of astronauts who visit mars, and find that few want to interact with them and they end up getting killed.

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