Literary Techniques In Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man

In the novel The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, Bradbury uses a unique writing style with a relatively basic structure of writing a few short sentences then a compound-complex sentence or one with a colon, or a sentence with dialogue to make the reader think, that makes the story shine. However, his vocabulary, ideas and this sentence structure makes The Illustrated Man a high energy book. The book is actually split into 18 short stories, and each one has unique characters, themes, etc. For this response I will be using parts from The Concrete Mixer, the 14th story of the novel. In this story, a martian named Ettil is dragged along to an invasion of Earth, against his will. He first resisted to join the invasion; he had forbidden Earth literature,

They have some plan. Something subtle and horrid. They’re going to do something to us- I know” (Bradbury 219). Another martian then yells to kill every one of them, only to be questioned by another martian on how they could kill people who call them ‘friend’ or ‘pal’. The way Bradbury weaved dialogue and short and long sentences into his story conveys the true uncertainty and insidious feeling of fear in the martians, really showing the reader what is going on. This type of showing and conveying an idea is seen again a bit later in the story, after Ettil has seen a bit more of Earth and has been given the choice to leave Earth to return to Mars or stay on Earth. He began writing a letter back to his wife, panicking, not knowing why the people of Earth had been so nice. He thinks of the perfect line to send to his wife: “...War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror” (Bradbury 233). Yet again, Bradbury uses dialogue to show the true panic that Ettil had after experiencing the warm welcomes from the Earthlings. The positioning of the dialogue force the reader to think in his characters’ shoes, and in doing this he creates a sense of immersion, as if the reader is in the book