Dark They Were And Golden Eyed Ray Bradbury Analysis

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Literary Analysis: DARK THEY WERE AND GOLDEN-EYED During the the 1940’s the great depression was at full swing and World War 2 had just ended in 1945. These two events not only played a large role in history but may have also greatly influenced one of the greatest authors, Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury saw first hand the effects of the great depression and war and it’s evident that his writings “Dark They Were and Gold-Eyed.” Superficially it may seem like a simple and meaningless story about a family that traveled to Mars with the intent of of escaping the catastrophic war going on Earth and unfortunately became consumed by Mars and became martians as a result. But in reality the short short had many of the symbol such as wind, water and rocket …show more content…

Throughout literature the symbolic meaning of water is frequently used, it can mean death, baptism or purification. In the short story “Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed,” Bradbury use a very similar symbolic meaning for water as well. In the short story water was the final stage of change. Whenever someone would go swim in the canal water of Mars they would come out completely different. Henry Bittering claimed “the water will work and eat away my flesh until the bones show like coral. Just my skeleton left. And then the water can build on that skeleton - green things, deep-water things, red things, yellow things. Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change.”(Bradbury 8) The water in fact did affect Harry since he no longer wanted to work with the rocket no more and it caused Harry to no longer have that arguing desire to return to Earth. Water was the complete change of earthlings to martians and it removed anything that was like of humanity, water was always a symbol of larger and rapid change in the story. Ray Bradbury chose water to symbolize large change in humanity because during the time in which it was written World Wars, the Great Depression and other important events were occurring and it was inevitable to avoid its affect on you as it’s to drink water. Since, one can’t avoid never drinking water and in a similar manner the people of the time we 're going to be affected by the …show more content…

In the story Harry wife 's exclaimed that “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth.”(Bradbury 2) As you can see, the atomic bomb wasn’t necessarily viewed as something negative by the people in the short story. On the contrary it was viewed as something that was suppose to fix the Earth but it was later seen that did does not occur because the bomb was used to bomb New York and destroyed their only way to return home. The atomic bomb was key because during World War 2 the atomic bomb was first introduced when they bombed Japan and many people viewed it positively because they viewed it has method to quickly end the war but we all know now today that is not true. Today the bombing of Japan is viewed as an unnecessary and excessive use of force, it brought a bad affect in the same way it did in the short story “Dark They Were and

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