1. Art and Diseño

UNIVERSIDAD VERACRUZANA
FACULTAD DE IDIOMAS
LENGUA INGLESA
SYMBOLISM IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY RAY
BRADBURY.
GUILLERMO GARCÍA FERNÁNDEZ
DIRECTOR DE TESIS:
JOSÉ FERNANDO ALARCÓN GONZÁLEZ
ASESOR DE LENGUA:
OLGA LIDIA SÁNCHEZ CRUZ
XALAPA, VERACRUZ, 12 DE MARZO, 2014.
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Agradecimientos
Agradecer no es una de mis cualidades, pues siempre que lo hago
sinceramente, quienes reciben tal halago lo creen falso y mal actuado y cuando no
agradezco nada, prefiero no decirlo. Por ello, prefiero agradecer secretamente a todos
aquellos obstáculos humanos que he encontrado a lo largo de estos veinte años de
estudios, maestros vengativos, resentidos y al mismo tiempo, compañeros que fueron
limitaciones para esta jornada creyendo que yo no podría hacerlo, sus frases y actos
desmotivadores son aquellas ovaciones que más recuerdo, las que me han incitado a
proseguir, a superar tales adversidades y decirme a mí mismo “si no hubiera
encontrado tales conflictos en esta lucha, no sería la persona que soy ahora, alguien
que no se rinde ante muros mentales, morales y físicos, menos ante los burocráticos.”
Agradecería a mis padres y a unos pocos, muy pocos de mis familiares, pero de
acuerdo a mis estudios lingüísticos, a veces, las palabras no son suficientes, dado que
con frecuencia, son palabras huecas o de esas que se lleva el viento. Así que depende
de ellos considerar un agradecimiento secreto y no dicho, pues “tres cuartas partes del
poema se pierden al dar nombre a lo que se describe a lo largo de él”, según el
Diccionario Akal de Estética (2010).
Agradezco a los docentes, no sólo los de la facultad, sino todos los otros
anteriores, los casi cien que puedo recordar ahora mismo, aunque sé que muchos de
ellos nunca sabrán de mí, excepto quienes lean esto debido a las distancias
geográficas y previos conflictos entre nosotros, aunque habrá un puñado de ellos que
ya llegaron al mundo ultra terreno sin la satisfacción de oírme decir “gracias por todo”,
sea poco o mucho su aporte.
De vuelta a esos enemigos y rivales que menciono al principio, debo incluir
particularmente a las chicas, pues todas las que he cortejado nunca vieron en mis
escritos más que absurdas pérdidas de tiempo, diciendo que tanto yo como mis
acciones eran irrelevantes e incapaces de trascender el interés suyo así como el de
otros.
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Como otros escritores de agradecimientos de tesis, agradezco a mis divinidades,
a veces dudando cuáles de todas las advocaciones católicas están encargadas de mi
custodia aparte de las que ya conozco.
Por desgracia tanto mía como para el resto del mundo literario, el culpable de
esta obra, Ray Bradbury, no está más por los alrededores para seguir ilustrándonos
más al respecto sobre los Dinosaurios, de los que escribió muy poco y, según él
mismo, amaba tanto como a Marte, sobre todo cuando yo pensaba contactarlo para
darle a conocer mis escritos sobre los reptiles diabólicos.
Como conclusión de esta breve reseña de dedicatorias, necesitaría hacer una
lista de todas las personas exactas que han intervenido en buena o mala medida a mi
formación, pero siguiendo las cadenas de relaciones de causas y efectos, tal registro
se extendería a infinidad de nombres, así que, quien se sienta aludido por este texto,
tiene a bien incluirse entre los que reciban estas susodichas gratitudes.
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Index
Acknowledgments.
1 Introduction. dinosaurs in Ray Bradbury’s literature.
1.1 Life of Ray Bradbury.
1.2 Biographical information related to the three analyzed short stories.
2 Notions of symbol and symbolism.
3 Analysis of “Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?”
3.1 Characters.
3.2 An allegory of Genesis.
3.3 The Baptist Church and the beasts.
3.4 Religious comparisons among the parents, the ancestors, the
dinosaurs.
3.5 Incidental symbols.
3.6 Transformation of rockets into trains and the time machine.
3.7 The house as the symbol of Ben’s body.
4 Analysis of “A Sound of Thunder”
4.1 Characters.
4.2 Christian, Roman and other western symbols.
5 General Conclusions.
Bibliography.
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1 Introduction. Dinosaurs in Ray Bradbury’s literature
Literature about dinosaurs has recently been considered as a children's issue rather
than a branch of the science fiction genre. This is maybe given to commercial purposes
or because dinosaurs cannot appear in so-called “serious” or “mature” writings. These
genres usually include adult scenes or scatological violence that should not be shown to
young audiences. In reality, dinosaurs in literature come from a series of texts which did
not have any intention to be directed to youth but be counted as science fiction or plain
fiction. In the case of Ray Bradbury, all of his novels and short stories go farther than
just the scientific issues of fiction, such as his well-detailed descriptions of human
nature and the very stylized prose typical in him. It would be disagreeable that his
literature is usually counted as mystery, tragedy or even romances. However those
stories dealing with other issues, in which characters do not have a devious behavior or
are children, are considered as infants' interest.
The challenge of this work lies in the fact that scarce information has been
written, published or told about Ray Bradbury and his writings about dinosaurs. By
means of a deep analysis of the prose and the common symbols found inside them
from other Bradbury's pieces, it will be demonstrated that there is a craving of this
magnificent author to express his interest in those evil-lizards, even though the only
source of such feeling is the little anthology of dinosaur Tales (1983).
The most famous of Ray Bradbury's oeuvres are well-known, such as The
Martian Chronicles (1950) or The Illustrated Man (1962), more especially Fahrenheit
451 (1965). They all have taken this magnificent author to the top of the genre of
science fiction. In this division of literature people are prone to think about adventures
that have happened outside this planet or in a distant future or living beings barely
related to the human kingdom. Ray Bradbury has admitted that one of his favorite topics
is the one related to dinosaurs. This comment indeed makes a contrast with the fact of
having written only a few stories about them along his huge and lengthy variety of
pieces of literature and cinematography.
Bradbury, in some of his short stories tried to write something about dinosaurs,
but dinosaurs have a little or no such an important value to the main plot or characters.
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However, Bradbury makes some extended descriptions of dinosaurs or poetical
discourses that could make reference to them. Such actions can be interpreted as a
personal, deep attempt to write about this theme, dinosaurs, inside a particular tale,
separated from the rest of his, instead of just being little compliments of the rest of the
imagery which inspires a terror compared to Poe's, but through living beings which,
even if they were in fashion during Bradbury's youth and his adulthood, nowadays they
are still a fascinating topic.
Among all of the tales that Bradbury has published through many editorial
houses, he could first separate the dinosaurs in 1953 in “A Sound of Thunder,” a story
in which he applies in a marvelous way the scientific concept of chaos theory as well as
the science fiction conception of H. G. Wells of time-traveling in a future a century
forwards Bradbury's time which is closer to our reality than the one of him when it first
came out. It also reminds Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (1918) in which some
hunters go after a dinosaur to kill it.
The logical explanations about the risks of traveling are so clear that can be
considered verisimilitude rather than just fantasy. Pterosaurs or flying dinosaurs which
are a panoramic part of the Cretaceous period, in this story are described as much as
they are in Halloween Tree (1960), where they did their very first appearance, like
anachronistic creatures without being appreciated in the way they should if they were in
the expected place and time, it is the sky of dinosaurs' era.
In the same way that Poe revealed his devices of writing in his Philosophy of
Composition (1846), Ray Bradbury revealed where many of his short stories' inspiration
come from on his book Zen in the Art of Writing (1993). It explains the creation of the
second dinosaurs' story “The Fog Horn” (1951). This story inspired his participation as
scriptwriter in the 1956's film of Moby Dick. Later it led him to the one called The Beast
from the 20,000 Fathoms which is the predecessor of Godzilla's movies and so forth.
This tale also makes reference to Ireland or Scotland's regions as a leitmotif of the Loch
Ness' Monster, in scientifically naming, a plesiosaurus. The lighthouse call also brings
back the myth of sirens from Classical Literature.
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Much later a third short story was written of this kind called “Prehistoric Producer”
or “Tyrannosaurus-Rex” (1962) a satirical tale about stop-motion movie makers mixed
with his passion to Mesozoic creatures.
Bradbury's impact and force which made him continue writing about dinosaurs
comes from his appreciation to Dickens' children characters on their moral dilemmas
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, considered the very first novel in opening
the genre of literature about dinosaurs, and a classic reading for dinosaurs' fanatics in
science or literary focus.
Finally, by 1983, just seven years before Michael Crichton released Jurassic
Park, the famous Bradbury's Green Town (the fictional place where many of his tales
happen) was dwelled by another young character of the Spaulding dynasty, it is
“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” This last tale was
published only in an anthology called Dinosaur Tales, including these four short stories
as well as two poems and an introduction in which he emphasizes his love to dinosaurs.
This last story can be summarized as follows: An orphan child, Ben Spaulding
dreams of becoming a full-grown dinosaur when adult. His fascination for dinosaurs
becomes so deep that he is interested in Biblical beasts as if they were indeed
dinosaurs. Ben experiences a fever which makes his grandparents believe he will really
turn into a dinosaur.
Even if Bradbury is not the only one who wrote about dinosaurs, another premise
is the way dinosaurs were imagined, pictured and received by audiences as well as
movie makers and writers before the raise of Crichton and Spielberg (in literature as on
screen), precisely in between 60s and 90s. In such gap, many scientific discoveries on
paleontology, especially in the United States propitiated the boom on fashion,
transmitted from the first findings from England, where Doyle started, like Bradbury,
since science fiction must depart from logic and scientific facts mixed with fiction.
Ethimologically, the word fiction means 'false', but in the English language it is
also close to 'narrative', in literature or another art. Most of the problems with science
fiction and its appreciation start from there. Apart from those who study the language or
literature, science fiction is mostly a type of overacted lies about future or alternate
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realities than stories derived from true scientific concepts, like technology advancement
or exploration.
To be factual, Verne's stories were considered absurd in his time, but almost all
of them have been demonstrated to by the progress of science. In regarding to
dinosaurs, Crichton was the only who could offer the readers a series of verifiable
reasons to get them back to life, despite not tried yet due to genetic engineering
legalization or the latent distrust of society to this early branch of knowledge.
The acceptance of Bradbury's readers to believe in his tales stands on the huge
chances that average people, children, working class employees, lonely men or so forth
are capable of being witnesses, makers or even victims of awesome conflicts he builds
on them. By his highly stylized prose, mystery not only is frightening or paranoiainductive, but also sublime since Bradbury makes any word expressed a part of the
environment. This environment is as average as the characters, so that these fantasies
could have happened anywhere, anytime and to anybody. Bradbury has the power to
grab the readers and make them believe whatever he wants them to (Indick, 1976).
According to Dinosaur Tales, his confidence of making true such ambiances is
mixed with the 'obligation' of science fiction to offer common-sense notion to count the
events as completely real. Since it is half science and half fiction (I'd rather say
literature), the rules established must be unbreakable as in reality. These two principles
definitely abound in “A Sound of Thunder,” “The Fog Horn,” and, in a short measure, in
“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?”
Another cause to analyze these three texts is the way dinosaurs are depicted in
each one. In the first tale, the recycled concept of the time machine figures as the
means of transportation to a distant world, like rockets in most of Bradbury's tales.
During this trip, dinosaurs are found in their original, pure state and time. Another
futuristic story goes back in time to the Cretaceous period, instead of going forward as
Bradbury usually does. From an exhaustive literary analysis, such explorers, like the
ones who reach the plateau in The Lost World, risk their lives to show their hunting
skills. They pursue a tyrannosaurus which represents an allegory of Jesus Christ in his
way to the wooden cross. A very religious aspect like this links “A Sound of Thunder” to
“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” since Ben compares
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leviathans and behemoths to dinosaurs as God's early pets and also compares them to
his lost parents, metaphorically as if evolution made dinosaurs parents of the human
kingdom.
A third factor is the solitude of characters. Ben is always alone or far from his
grandfather or friends. The tyrannosaurus from “A Sound of Thunder” is condemned to
die a lonely animal which will not reproduce its genes for the future. The plesiosaurus
from “The Fog Horn” emerges of deep sea since it hears the lighthouse horn as a
mating call. This animal lies beneath, alone and waiting for its own kind. Once it
becomes disappointed by the building light, it destroys it and comes down to the sea
again, probably resigned to his sadness.
The fourth motivation for this study is the vocabulary Bradbury used in these
tales. All of the repetitive words, phrases and images are linked. A dog in the waste land
resembles the tyrannosaurus in the early Earth before humans build anything. The
beast from the deeps or abyss, like the ones Ben likes or the plesiosaurus itself, the
dark, evil kites or pterosaurs, and obviously the sound of thunder as subtle
environmental details which could make believe they all are happening at the same
second, despite the fact that one happened in the 1930s, and the other in 'present' and
the last one in 60 million years before man.
Since dinosaurs were first discovered in England and later found throughout the
United States rather than in other countries on Earth, it is understandable that these
nations have scientific facts and knowledge to let literature authors develop such topics.
In the United States are the best and numerous museums. Also it is one of the countries
whose universities are more concentrated on geology research, discoveries and traces
of dinosaurs.
Personally, a fifth personal reason can support this thesis is the appreciation to
dinosaurs claimed by Ray Bradbury. My personal appreciation of dinosaurs comes from
my readings about them in scientific books. Currently, after reading Crichton’s books
and watching many films about dinosaurs, I decided to find the way dinosaurs were
depicted in society or towards popular culture to go further to literature. It is only in
science-fiction where dinosaurs are perceived almost as seriously treated as
paleontology. Moreover, in science fiction dinosaurs are described far from scientific
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names and strata badlands, like an almost unknown, mysterious reality about past.
Recent research has demonstrated Bradbury has influenced some authors I admire,
except for Faulkner and Shakespeare, such as R. L. Stine, or Michael Crichton.
These amazing creatures are still a cause of discussion and controversy in the
eternal battle between science and religion. They are hard undeniable evidence of
evolution. From this notion comes the idea of considering science fiction, especially the
one about dinosaurs in literature as a matter of serious writing, as the devices applied in
the process of writing science fiction may be compared to Realism, Romanticism and
another literary stream for proceeding from they all and being a branch of this art as
equal as the other ones. Thinking of science fiction as inferior is quite common, taken
as vulgar, popular or even commercial or immature, but also so-called cultivated
readers catalog this genre under that offense.
All of the literature oeuvres are tokens of imagination, from the autobiographical,
testimonial to the most creative or fantastic. Denying science fiction as part of such
imagination world would be denying one's childhood, denying imagination means
dreaming, means change. Imagination and fantasy are the forces of human nature,
without them, life would be passive and boring. It is needed not to forget that
imaginative notions had led human kingdom from caves to be the fittest species.
Dinosaurs in literature are as important as any other fantastic topic, such as platonic
love, the basis of most of plots. Every detail in literature is an output of imagination
extracted from reality, like dinosaurs unburied from Earth layers. Reading about
dinosaurs is over-idealizing the things that were dressing up the bones again, build
castles on air. Not only amusing is the purpose of any type of literature, but also
teaching; this division makes learn that science fiction writers study some parts of
sciences to consolidate their works. Dinosaur literature not only introduces children to
advanced sciences, also adults shorten before dinosaur shapes and become as
knowledge-thirsty as children, as if they were still primitive, weak creatures.
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1.1 Life of Ray Bradbury.
Raymond Douglas Spaulding Bradbury, also known as Ray Bradbury, was born
in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22nd, 1920. He is the son of Leonard Spaulding
Bradbury, a power plant inspector and Esther Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant.
He comes from a family of editors and printers. He had three brothers, Samuel and
Leonard, four years older than him. Samuel died two years before Ray Bradbury was
born. His uncle and aunt had the complete collection of Burroughs literature. From then
on he discovered the passion for Mars, Tarzan and Caspak, a lost island of dinosaurs
and other prehistoric creatures, by which he was inspired first to write the dinosaur short
stories analyzed in this study. His mother read him tales of Edgar Allan Poe before
going to sleep. Bradbury collected comics of The Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon and
Buck Rogers, these last inspired him to write about future and space travel. He
collected such comics from that time until 1937 (Nollan, 1976).
In 1931, when he visited a carnival he was scared by a bizarre performer, Mr
Electrico, who predicted that Bradbury had to live forever and he realized that the only
way would be through writing. When he was twelve years old, his family moved from
Illinois to Arizona. Before 1937 he started mailing short stories to Harper's Magazine
and Saturday Evening Post, but they were often rejected. In 1937 he attended a science
fiction convention for the first time. He met other young writers such as Forrest
Ackerman, who led Bradbury to publish his tales in Imagination, a magazine at the
beginning of 1938. From that time onwards, he published several stories in fanzines or
magazines printed by beginner young writers. Another famous science-fiction writer who
met Bradbury was Robert Heinlein, from whom he learned some literary techniques
(Nollan, 1976).
Once Bradbury finished high school, he ran a newsstand and obtained enough
money to live on his own and devoted his life to writing. In 1939 Bradbury published his
own fanzine called Futuria Fantasia to promote the texts he had produced until that
year. Ackerman, Heinlein and Damon Knight also joined his fanzine, but they could only
afford till the fourth issue. Damon Knight became the main critic of Ray Bradbury's
works since he thought Bradbury was not as talented as he was and insisted Bradbury
was only repeating other authors' ideas (Nollan, 1976).
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Ray Bradbury continued writing for several dailies with poems, essays, criticisms
and reviews, and so he left acting and became strictly a writer of prose. By 1942 he also
stopped selling newspapers and his stories were published by Amazing Stories and
Weird Tales. Since only Weird Tales accepted his works, he ceased using pseudonyms
for other printing houses to which he mailed poorly written romances (Nollan, 1976).
When World War II started he was rejected by the army for being nearsighted,
then he wrote radio-show scripts for the Red Cross Blood Bank to entertain active
soldiers and injured troopers. When the war ended, he traveled to Mexico by car to visit
the Guanajuato mummies and wrote about them. Writing the tale “The Black & White
Big Game” led him to figure in Martha Foley's The Best American Stories of 1946, which
was not included as science fiction, but simply fiction, among the current most famous
authors (Nollan, 1976).
He married Margerite McClure in 1947 and had four daughters, before his first
short-story collection, Dark Carnival, was published. To afford his married life he
gathered past unpublished texts and finished one of his main works, The Martian
Chronicles, which appeared in1950. It launched him to become one of the authorities of
science fiction due to his mixture of poetic prose and the archetypes of space journeys.
The Illustrated Man, another collection of short stories was published in 1951. The
Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953 is the third collection of tales exclusively released by
Doubleday Editorial. Two of the stories analyzed in this study proceed from this
collection (Nollan, 1976).
Up to this point, Bradbury’s biography has been described from the facts points
of view. However, psychologically, Ray Bradbury presents certain attitudes and
characteristics he manifests in his works. Such tokens of eccentric behavior have
resisted along time as points of criticism. He was reactionary to the idea that his family
could purchase a television to keep his life healthy and moving. Bradbury is not
precisely against technology for itself, but to the use that people can give to new
machinery and knowledge. He is a poet and moralist of the Space Era who thinks
human kingdom must defeat self-destruction impulses to achieve a factual technological
and social development. Bradbury states that science-fiction is the literature field in
which writers are able to find true examples and tools to criticize the current social
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mistakes and troubles. For him, it is a genre in which literary restraints over ideas are
loose enough to let writers exploit most of themselves and their realities. (Nollan, 1976).
1.2 Biographical information related to the three analyzed short stories.
These three short stories have one point in common, they are about dinosaurs.
They were written during different moments of Ray Bradbury's life. Despite such
similitude, each one of them has a particular reason of inspiration. As his interest in
dinosaurs developed, Bradbury not only dealt with literature, but also with various
personal and professional projects.
Yo estaba enamorado, por entonces [in his first childhood], de los monstruos, los
esqueletos y los circos y las ferias y los dinosaurios y, por último, el Planeta
Rojo.
(Bradbury, 2003:49)
One of the analyzed short stories is from The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953).
This is “A Sound of Thunder,” in which Bradbury applies, the scientific concept of chaos
theory as well as the science fiction concept of H. G. Wells of time-traveling. The setting
is the future a century after Bradbury's time. The story is about wealthy hunters who
time-travel to the Cretaceous period to kill a Tyrannosaurus-Rex. It is a reminiscence of
Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot (1918) in which some soldiers pursue a dinosaur
to kill it. The logical explanations about the risks of traveling are so clear that they can
be considered verisimilitude rather than just fantasy (Glutz, 1997):
Bradbury’s tale serves not only to entertain but also to speculate on the dangers
of time travel. His illustration of a ripple effect on the timeline caused by a
seemingly unrelated events over a long period of time is not only demonstrated
by the climax of the story, but is also explained in the context of the story […] The
climax of the story involves the return of the hunting party to the office of Time
Safari Inc. which still oddly enough still exists, but the language has evolved
differently. […] It's an interesting coincidence that Bradbury chose a butterfly to
symbolize the chaotic effect multiplied over time. The term Butterfly Effect did
not originate with this tale, but rather was coined after MIT research
meteorologist Edward Lorenz.
(“A Sound of Thunder: Review”)
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The second short story is “Besides a dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You
Grow Up?” It was only published in an anthology called dinosaur Tales in 1983. It
includes these related short stories as well as two poems and a foreword. This last story
can be summarized in this way: An orphan child, Ben Spaulding dreams of becoming a
full-grown dinosaur when he becomes an adult. His fascination for dinosaurs became so
deep that he is interested in Biblical beasts as if they were indeed dinosaurs. Ben
develops a fever which scares his grandparents until they believe he will really turn into
a dinosaur (Bradbury, 2005).
According to Zen in the Art of Writing (2003), all of the stories related to
Greentown (his fictional Waukegan) are about children dealing with personal
nightmares or intrigues or nocturnal frights:
Luego echaba una larga mirada a los verdes manzanos y la vieja casa donde
había nacido, y a la casa de al lado donde vivían mis abuelos, y a todos los
prados verdes de mis primeros veranos, y me ponía a probar palabras para eso.
(Bradbury, 2003: 69) […] por el camino me encontré en el sótano, triturando
uvas en la prensa de mi padre […] (71)
These symbols, the prairie, the grandparents, the house and so forth are present in
“Besides a dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” and will be more
widely exposed in the analysis. Since Bradbury argues having written such story during
his twenties (Bradbury, 2003):
Advierto que apenas he hablado de hasta ahora de una variedad de criaturas
que encontraran ustedes su rastro en estas páginas, alzándose aquí y en las
pesadillas para hundirse allá en la soledad y la desesperación: los dinosaurios.
Desde los diecisiete años hasta los treinta y dos escribí una media docena de
libros de dinosaurios.
(Bradbury, 2003:56)
Since “The Fog Horn” was written near 1952, as well as “A Sound of Thunder” it is
possible that “Besides a dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” was
originally typed fifteen years before, but published until the whole tales were gathered in
the 1983 anthology (Bradbury, 1993).
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In 1964, Bradbury wrote a prologue for a new translation of Verne's 20 Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, comparing Moby Dick's captain Ahab and Nemo (Bradbury,
1993). The designers of New York World Fair hired Bradbury to design the American
pavilion, containing space ships, dinosaurs and a futuristic engineering depiction of the
building (NGM: 1965).
By the time the decade of 1980 started, Bradbury was hired by Disneyland to
design the Epcot Center aisle called Earth Ship. In that building he stored his own
preferred passages of the human kingdom and its history in addition to future imagery
(Bradbury, 1993).
Incluidos los dinosaurios.
Todas mis actividades, todo el crecimiento, los nuevos trabajos y los nuevos
amores, los nuevos trabajos y los nuevos amores, causados y creados por el
primitivo amor a esas bestias que yo veía a los cinco años [The first movie on
dinosaurs, The Lost World, dates back from 1925] y que protegí amorosamente
a los veinte y los veintinueve y los treinta.
(Bradbury, 2003: 55-56)
Recently Ray Bradbury continued writing diverse genres of literature such as
fiction, non-fiction and drama, but the direct inclusion of dinosaurs is limited to these
short stories. The importance of this study is to highlight the value of these tales as
much as the rest of the popularly known works by Bradbury (Nollan, 1976)
Ray Bradbury won several awards and prizes for his literary and filmic career
since the middle 60s when his first tales were adapted for television and theater as well
as radio shows. Some examples are the National Medal of Arts Award in 2004 (Indick:
2006) or the Icon Award in 2010 (ISFDB: 2011). Bradbury died in June, 2012, at 92
years given to his old age.
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2 Notions of symbol and symbolism.
The purpose of this study is an analysis of the short stories by Ray Bradbury
through the literary theory of narratology. Narratology is a theory which specializes in
written speech departing from the basic part of its composition, words. Certain divisions
of narratology focus on characterization, focalization, historic context or symbolism
(Angenot, 1999). Symbolism is a complex theory which varies according to grammar
functions; one of them is vocabulary and intertextuality. Among the diverse critics and
experts of speech analysis is Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov defines vocabulary through
symbolism, or the ideas of symbols proceeding from relation subject-object or
significance-significant (Gonzalez, 1999). The notions of symbol and symbolism by
Todorov will be useful for understanding and analyzing these three short stories by Ray
Bradbury. Bradbury’s texts commonly include several symbols of his own meaning as
well as collective definitions or concepts.
A symbol can be understood according to Cooper as a semantic construct which
substitutes one term or identity by other (1996). This means that a symbol is a word or
image, generally used in poems, riddles and witty forms of speech to express a further
significance beyond simple, literal meaning, and that is why they become one of the
most complexes of rhetorical figures. Other items related to symbols are allegories and
metaphors. These two concepts are easier to decipher than symbols since their hidden
meaning is quite understandable according to the context of the speech (Cooper: 1996).
The use of symbolism in literature proceeds from Romanticism, in the beginning
of the 19th century. For example, Schlegel, a German aesthete, declared that poetry
must be a continuous process of symbolizing. He declared such statements given that
Goethe determined a difference between allegory and symbol. For Goethe an allegory
possesses a seemingly symbolic meaning, but it is still including a very literal
dependence for the expected interpretation of its significance (Todorov: 1984).
However, since symbols have several meanings at the same time, then their limits are
immeasurable and difficult to fix in only a few concepts given to the wide variety of
contexts through time and place (Copper: 1996).
Since literature is an art and art requires a deep and indirect understanding by
unconsciousness to be completely appreciated, the symbol acquires a spiritual power.
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This power, either mythic or personal, can be placed farther than the direct words or the
mere literal meaning of letters, concepts and sentences. Besides, this power also
recalls inner feelings in contrast with intellectual forces which deal with instincts and
other components of nature. This connection with nature against intellect is another
legacy of Romanticism. Because of that, a symbol is unable to express only a single
concrete idea: A lion is a symbol of Jesus for its royalty, but it also could represent
Satan by its fury. Symbols are not absolute in order to allow the artist to be inspired and
collect the details he plans to install in his oeuvre (Soriau: 2010).
The concepts of significance and significant, previously mentioned, proceed from
Ideas’ Theory by Plato in the 6th century B.C. (Perez, 2003), but it was due to linguistics
being defined as a science that such principles were taken again. According to
Saussure (1916), language has two subdivisions, social and individual. The individual
division is also named speech. As social language is systemic, the individual division is
prone to vary due to personal valorization of the meaning of linguistic particles such as
either sign or significance. During the life of an individual, as he or she develops, tends
to add new or different values to signs or symbols used in daily speech. In order to
communicate with other individuals, language has become a convention of sign usage
relatively stable. From these two notions, the figure of sign as a particle of speaking is
defined as a dual entity of psychic value (Saussure, 1916).
Todorov (1998) also coincides with Saussure's origin of symbol and its particularsocial duality. For him either the particular notion or idea produced from a word or a
sentence taken from a text is able to gain a conventional meaning. Such convention is
the starting point of the symbolic interpretation. This means each phrase or sentence,
according to each context, can be used or interpreted manifold. These variations permit
a direct sense and a coexistent or indirect one. Following Todorov’s theories it is
possible a distinction between both senses by considering first, each linguistic
dimension: direct sense is originated from words’ literal meaning. Second in their order
of appearance: direct sense arises before indirect. Third, their number of senses: direct
sense is univocal as indirect is plurivocal (Moncada, 1998).
Since Todorov coins the term ‘linguistic symbolism,’ (1998) he is aware of the
symbol in its general meaning. This happens because Todorov focuses on linguistic
16
performance as well as solidity of symbolism. Particularly in literary texts, Todorov
explains that they reveal a symbolic nature since readers discover an indirect sense
through a labor of interpretation (Moncada, 1998). The interpretation process is the
existence of certain inner features which appeal to interpreting reactions. One of these
inner features is intertextuality. Consequentially, readers decide to search for
background of texts, where the pure symbolism originates. This labor of research is
easier for readers already familiar with the works of the studied author and discovers his
particular definitions of certain symbols. Later on surges a certain lack of compatibility
between the first sense of words or phrases and their contexts, to which readers adapt
to understand the text. Once this dilemma appears, readers establish allusions and
relationships among direct sense and diverse varieties of indirect senses. Such a
process repeats until verbal sequences adjust to predefined linguistic schemes
(Moncada, 1998).
The application of symbols that is still current proceeds from Romanticism.
However, the conventional and simple use of symbols is a feature originated with
human civilization. Since the primeval observation of environment, men set a name or
word and a concept to each part composing its reality in order to explain it to the
community. Natural changes as day and night, rain or seasons were attributed to divine
forces to configure early religions. Later, the cyclic repetition of such events presumably
caused by such forces strengthened the beliefs of the peoples experiencing such
phenomena. Along the years these attributions gained an historical significance. By
these two ways of assimilation, the abstraction of symbol is both an spiritual and a
sensible affair, that converts it into an object of social and personal appreciation, being
both meanings different in intensity for the subject or beholder, in contrast as in
coincidence, deriving in a harmony of dual or triple or manifold interpretations (Cirlot:
1969).
Once Todorov’s research and classification of symbols has been explained, the
symbol, in its application in literature includes its own varieties.
Symbolism may occur in any of the elements discussed above: a plot or
character or setting may have some symbolic value. There heavy symbolism
[since the beginning, the title of the story], but if we think about the title, with its
suggestions […], we can see that [the author] has chosen his title carefully, and it
has both ironic and symbolic overtones.
17
(Gwinn, 2009: 16)
Symbols in literature may be many more than the ones the reader can find at first
glance. The tale possibly includes a myriad of symbols, but the first ones to be found
surely are the most important for the author, such as the tropes of ambits or concepts of
the tale (revenge, friendship, courage, love, etc). In that situation the symbols easily
identified are closely related to such tropes (Gwinn: 2009).
R. S. Gwinn (2009) identifies four divisions of texts catalogued as symbolic:
allegory or parable, traditional symbols, private symbols and incidental symbols.
Allegories or parables are “the literal events point to a parallel sequence of symbolic
ideas” (Gwinn, 2009: 15), thus allegories are a group of symbols directed to only a
specific meaning. Parables are also groups of symbols and images closely related to
the intentions of the author. The best example of parables resides in The Four Gospels,
in which Jesus teaches people with simple symbols, harvest as death, farmers as
angels or herds as people (Gwinn: 2009).
Traditional symbols are ideas or concepts from a certain culture or region in
which they can easily identify the hidden meaning according to the intentions of the
author (Gwinn: 2009). For example, the Chinese culture identifies dragons as a symbol
of imperial power, a symbol of protection, royalty and strength, while western beliefs
about dragons are inclined to identify it as a figure of destruction, evil and doom (Cirlot:
1969). Heretofore, a Chinese reader is able to understand the truly meaning or direction
that a Chinese author offers him, although a reader of another country might find a
contrasting opinion about the same tale (Gwinn: 2009).
Private symbols usually represent repeating images which a certain author
includes in his writing. Poe’s texts often include the death of young beautiful ladies or a
duality of characters. Given such private symbols, readers are prone to identify their
features expressed in diverse ways in other texts of the same writer (Gwinn: 2009).
Finally, incidental symbols are actions or images an author may repeat and
usually lack an apparent signification. Moreover such symbols indeed have a strong and
deep meaning for the authors, but usually only for that tale or that moment of the
reading. Sometimes other symbols reveal a difficulty of identification:
18
How can we learn to spot these symbols? Paying close attention to the way an
author repeats certain details or otherwise points to their significance is the key.
Deciding what a symbol means is often less important than merely realizing that
it exists. The meaning of incidental symbolism is usually object to multiple
interpretations that do not necessarily contradict one another.
(Gwinn, 2009: 16)
These incidental symbols are often found by the second, third or forthcoming readings
of the same text, in which the most hidden meanings can be discovered. The true
intentions of the author which made them write precisely those sentences or symbols
are revealed by incidental symbols.
The motivation for this study derives from the fact that Ray Bradbury is
considered a poet as well as a science fiction writer owing to his poetic prose style
(Bradbury: 2003). One of the most important parts of poetry is symbolism (Peck: 1993).
The symbols Bradbury includes in these stories can be cataloged by the definitions of
Todorov as well as the ones by Gwinn. This happens because their indirect sense has
two divisions: the significance these symbols have acquired for society and for the
author himself (Moncada, 1998). Such contrasts are the main goals of the analysis of
this research project. Also, comparing these three short stories with each other will
depart from their intertextuality of recurrent imagery and symbolic components, such as
incidental ones.
The most important symbol the three tales have in common is the figure of
dinosaurs. Since it is not a recurring symbol in any myth or ancient culture, such symbol
is divided into several pieces which are broader symbols. Moreover, if a symbol is what
it directly is, it is also what it may be and what it represents. So, departing from the
Greek Latin name of dinosaurs, meaning Terrible Lizards, result several other nouns
and words, more broadly understood by both Cirlot (1969) and Du Four (1982): reptile is
related to serpents, the symbolic serpent is the one of Eden in Judaeo-Christian
tradition Another well-known symbol of reptile is the Dragon, universal flood, ancient
lore or wilderness forces of peril (Cirlot, 1969).
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3 Analysis of “Besides a dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?”
Synopsis: An orphan child, Ben Spaulding dreams of becoming a full-grown dinosaur
when he becomes an adult. His fascination for dinosaurs grows so deep that he is
interested in Biblical beasts as if they were indeed dinosaurs. Ben passes through a
fever which scares his grandparents near making them believe he will really transform
into a dinosaur.
First, Douglas, the main character of Dandelion Wine’ (1957) lives near Ben
Spaulding’s house. It is possible that Douglas’ house is not mentioned in this story due
to the fact that many events happen inside the building, inside its yard and in a few
scenes there are references to a meadow right in front of the grandparents’ home: “Y lo
más importante, ¿existe la gran casa con el Abuelo y la Abuela y los inquilinos y los tíos
y tías? Esto ya lo he contestado” (Bradbury, 2003: 74). There is not any moment in
which Bradbury had written about a place around Ben’s house, except for the veldt in
front of it. Among Ben actions, he always looks to the front veldt. In case he does not
look out, he looks inside the house, towards the sky or the basement. There is more
emphasis on what is told or heard inside the property. These details keep the house
isolated from previous conceptions about Green Town, Illinois in which Ben’s home is
more important than the rest of the settlement. This seemingly express that Ben is
developing a conscious travel to change his life. For instance, this trip is his transition
from last childhood to puberty. Only a few more landmarks from Green Town are
present, for instance the Court house bell, the cinema or the Baptist Church, recurrent
in other tales (Bradbury, 2005). The church offers him a spiritual link through a new
interpretation of the Bible imparted by Reverend Clue. This new view lets evolution and
Christianity develop together through fundamentals that Ben will enjoy. This awareness
makes Ben wish to die and go to Hell to meet the beasts which dwell in the deeps of the
earth and seas (an obvious approach to “The Fog Horn”) e.g. behemoths or leviathans.
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3.1 Characters
Ben is a twelve-year-old boy who is an orphan and lives with his grandparents in a
boarding house. One of his passions is his love for dinosaurs. He has some friends but
he prefers his dog called Rex as his only companion. His name, according to Dufour,
has a Biblical meaning for Ben which is the youngest son of Israel and his last as well
(1982). This meaning is pertinent since Ben is the youngest in the Spaulding’s family;
his grandparents are old and sterile, as Jacob himself and only Ben is the hope to
continue the lineage. Ben, reluctant to talk about his feelings, denies talking about the
situation of the lake (which is the name of another Bradbury’s short story.) involved with
the disastrous, mysterious death of his parents who drowned in it but were never found
(Bradbury: 2005)
Ben is a lonesome soul such as the Plesiosaur from “The Fog Horn” and the
Tyrannosaurus from “A Sound of Thunder.” In these two last stories, the solitude is the
main cause of suffering of both creatures. The Plesiosaur is in search of his own herd
meanwhile the Tyrannosaur must die since he will not reproduce to continue his
species. The fever lapsus he suffers in the tale resembles a very fast process of
transformation from childhood to puberty instead of a lengthy and slow series of
physical and emotional changes which humans experience in real life. His evolution
resembles the metamorphosis of a butterfly, which takes place in a few days. For
Bradbury, such a transformation is related to his desire of writing, expressed in Zen in
the Art of Writing:
[...] me guiaban las ideas. Cuanto más hacía, más quería hacer. Uno se vuelve
voraz. Le entran fiebres. Conoce júbilos. De noche no puede dormir porque la
criatura bestial quiere asomar y hace que uno se vuelva a la cama. Es un
magnífico modo de vivir. (Bradbury, 2003: 58-9)
Voracity is a typical and negative feature given to dinosaurs, for the author, as for
his voracity for writing becomes a positive quality. Bradbury, as Ben, imagines himself
as a voracious and giant creature. The ideas Ben acquires from dinosaurs books drive
him to crave for more information about them until he falls ill in order to develop a fever.
The bestial creature dreading to rise inside himself is also present in the tale, since
Ben’s Grandpa awakes in the middle of the night during Ben’s fever, afraid of the fact
21
that his grandson may become a dinosaur.
Another important character is Grandpa who works as the paternal figure to
guide Ben throughout his infancy. In contrast, he is initially described as an indecisive
person who is easily tired of any occupation outside his house. Ray Bradbury himself
comes from a printers’ family and it is included as one of Grandpa’s hobbies (Nolan,
1976). Since Grandpa is not Ben’s biological father, he becomes a distant, blood-tied
authority. Such a relationship leads Ben to keep most of his feelings and ideas secret.
His lack of complete confidence in people leads him to go away from those who are
unable to understand his feelings or try to restrain his thoughts as he behaves before
Grandpa or even Reverend Clue. Reverend Clue has a satirical name to make holy or
reverend a hint or clue. This clue is the approach to dinosaurs through their comparison
to Bible beasts. The Reverend is a young priest who has open-minded ideas about
religion which is needed to attract younger people of Ben’s age back to Faith.
Mr. Wineski is the only named boarder. He is the town’s barber and can be
considered an antagonist since he tells Ben offensive sentences. His negative actions
lead Ben to hate him too. Finally Grandma, the dog and the cat, and the boarders as a
whole entity are the rest of the characters who are not described, but each of them lies
under an archetype name. Given to the fact such figures lie named as archetype or
symbolic denominations and have a small impact in the tale, their analysis proceed not
further than their mere meaning.
In spite of the chronological order of events, this analysis proceeds from the
stylized prose and repetitive imagery developed along the whole plot. These features of
the tale will be divided according to the spheres of the most repeated words or phrases
such as The Dog, The beast and the Deeps, the house:
Pero mucho antes de eso seguí haciendo listas. EL PRADO. EL ARCON DE
JUGUETES. EL MONSTRUO. TIRANOSAURIO REX. EL RELOJ DEL PUEBLO.
LA VIEJA. EL VIEJO [...]
(Bradbury, 2003: 23)
Bradbury, in order to develop his stories, first used to write some abstract words, with
no apparent link or absolute meaning when separated and then, taking advantage of
their multiple interpretations, and their symbolic properties, a new tale would flourish as
22
a poetic prose text (2003) In the previous listing are typed the names which are
important details in the imagery of these tales, more especially for “Besides a Dinosaur,
Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?”: The veldt, the monster, the tyrannosaurus,
the town hall clock bell, the old man, and the old woman are symbols present in this
story which help to delimitate not only the atmosphere of the text, but its plot and
characters.
3.2 An allegory of Genesis
From the beginning of the story, the negative relationship between dinosaurs and
religion is quite notorious. The allusion of finding dinosaurs among clouds motivates
readers to think of these creatures living in Heaven and their steps and roars become
thunder and lightning.
Maybe it was staring at the sky that making him say it. Up there were great
shapes, strange beast traveling who-knows-where out of who-knew-when. Maybe
it was a growl of thunder beyond the horizon, a storm making up its mind to arrive.
Or maybe this made him remember the shadows in the Field Museum where Old
Time stirred like those other shadows seen last Saturday matinee when they reran
The Lost world and monsters fell off cliffs and the boys stopped running up and
down the aisles and yelled with terror and delight. Maybe
(Bradbury, 2005: 25).
Gwinn (2009) establishes that allegories are types of symbols that can be easily
identified since they are groups of words with related meanings. For Dufour (1982)
thunder and lightning are tokens of struggle in Heaven, in the same way Greeks
believed they were sounds of Zeus weapons to punish pagan people and the tools he
used to defeat Titans and force them to be jailed in the Tartar abyss. However, the
creatures which fall off cliffs are representations of Lucifer being ejected from Heaven
and exiled to the Deeps of Hell (Dufour, 1982). In addition, in the movie of 1925 The
Lost World, in one scene, dinosaurs fight and one of them falls off a cliff.
The boys running in chaos inside the cinema are compared to early humans who
enjoy pagan rituals and barbarism before God punishes them with the Flood,
represented in the proximities of the storm. During the flood, giant men and animals
23
perished drowned by the high water level. In these cases, the short story begins
following the patterns of the Book of Genesis: Evil creatures roam the skies or heavens,
then they are expulsed to abysses; finally, as childish humans start a riot, a sudden
storm terrorizes them and they cease their chaos. Later, they scatter around the land in
an image similar to the different sons of Noah spreading around the world to re-dwell it
again.
3.3 The Baptist Church and the beasts
Ben attends the Baptist church in order to listen to a sermon about hellish creatures
which he mistakes with dinosaurs. Ben mixes his orphanhood to his love to dinosaurs in
the moment he meets the reverend. Ben realizes he can make his wishes come true
only if he prays with faith for an unselfish goal (Bradbury: 2005) Once he is selfconvinced that his childish wishes are fair, he desires either to go to Hell to find
dinosaur-like creatures or that God should make them roam the land again: “I mean,”
said Ben, “if someone wishes for something bad enough, it comes true?” (Bradbury,
2005: 36). Dufour establishes (1982), that Ben resembles the basis of requirements for
faith which if were the size of a seed of mustard it would move mountains. Since he is
an innocent boy, his wishes are faithfully proposed.
Ben is not aware whether his wish is bad or not and he begs for it with enormous
fervor. Ben infers the same abstract notions of evil and good to dinosaurs, which are
interesting for him but receives a negative definition by the reverend and the rest of the
people. Ben insists in asking the reverend for the religious explanations about the end
of dinosaurs because, even if he knows the scientific reasons, the relationship he
establishes between beasts and evil lizards proceeds from a spiritual aspect:
“I mean, why would God make dinosaurs and then lose them?”
“Wouldn’t it be great, if we had our very own dinosaur here in Green Town, Illinois,
arrived again, and never lost. The bones are great. But the real thing, wouldn’t that
be swell?” […]
“Do you think God will ever invent them again?”
(Bradbury, 2005: 36-37)
The boy lacks doubts about the fact that God created dinosaurs as he created the
24
whole life on Earth. What he wants to know is why they disappeared because for him
they are not dead creatures. According to the bones mentioned in this quote, there is a
link to the passage of bones returned to life from the book of Ezekiel (Dufour, 1982)
even if Ben had sundered from church-learning before and does not know about this
text. Moreover, he wonders if God may return dinosaurs to life or send them back to
Earth one more time.
Reverend Clue realizes Ben has misunderstood the true meanings of the
Scriptures and his sermon: “The conversation, the Reverend could see, was headed to
the bog. He did not intend to sink there” (Bradbury, 2005: 37). Thus he attempts to
return the conversation to the only bad side of the evil creatures: “All I know for sure is,
if you die and go to Hell, the beasts’ll be there, or a facsimile, waiting for you.”
(Bradbury, 2005: 37). Here is a clear reference to Ben’s parents, lost in a dark and deep
pit or a lake similar to the one in which they died. The Reverend Clue, talking about Hell
with a subtle speech, turns it into a paradise from Ben’s point of view. In these extracts
Ben believes that he can find his parents as soon as he dies because he either wishes
for visiting them (either in Hell or Heaven) or that God brings them back to life in the
same way Jesus resurrected Lazarus (Dufour, 1982). Ben figures his lost parents, his
closest ancestors and origins as distant as dinosaurs are from him, many million years
far away. Because of such a distance “Ben was lost in time, mist and sump-water
trackless bogs” (Bradbury, 2005: 30). His absence from his peers resembles the
plesiosaurus of “The Fog Horn,” since both are sunken and sundered by distance and
time.
Ben’s solitude and the death of his parents in his childhood are anachronisms. It
is natural or very common that parents usually die by the time their sons are older, selfsufficient, and not children anymore. However, Ben’s parents died in an accident, not by
natural means. Cirlot (1969) explains lakes as stalemate waters, without motion or
chance to find renewal, then ‘Sump waters’ resemble the lake of Ben’s parents’ death, a
process of the circle of life which is the end and marches not beyond. Ben was in a
trackless place because he has no ideas about God’s designs and about people, before
he meets Reverend Clue to guide him through Hell with his sermon. Since that moment
he only thinks of Deeps as the place to find living dinosaur spirits:
25
And brontosaur begat pteranodon and pteranodon begat tyrannosaur and
tyrannosaur begat the great midnight kitespterodactyls! And... so on and so forth
and et cetera.
(Bradbury, 2005: 37)
Ben, wishing to become a dinosaur is also looking for his parents to love him and be as
close to them as all the diverse dinosaur species are, especially tyrannosaurus, the
number one. Given that tyrannosaurus means tyrant king of evil lizards (Benton, 1989),
Ben can easily identify it as a resemblance of Satan as the leader and the other
dinosaurs are his minions or vassals: “[…] a genealogy of beasts with Lucifer the black
goatherd on the swarm.” (Bradbury, 2005: 35). This swarm of herd or pack, is a nonchaotic status of cosmic or natural wild forces which is not totally disciplined yet but is a
middle condition of harmony (Cirlot, 1969)
Scientifically, tyrannosaurus was one of the dinosaurs which indeed lived and
perished at the end of the Cretaceous period instead of dying from old age or diseases
(Holtz, 2007). The list of names previously quoted is a satire of names from the Book of
Genesis, in which Noah’s genealogy is described (Dufour, 1982). These names, written
in Hebrew phonetics, sound as trivial as Latin-and-Greek dinosaur names. In a certain
way the order in which Bradbury wrote the names of dinosaurs is related to the
evolutionary place and period they lived in. Brontosaur or Apatosaurus dates back from
the Early Jurassic period. Pteranodon comes from Late Jurassic until the beginning of
Cretaceous. Even if tyrannosaurus first appeared in Middle Cretaceous, it lived during
the last part of this period while the time pterodactyls still lived (Holtz, 2007).
As it can be seen, Ben identifies himself as a dinosaur. His closest relatives, his
parents, lie in deep abyss, buried or sunken. [...] all first aunts and dreadful uncles of
Lost Time and strange blood and odd flesh (Bradbury, 2005: 37). The strange blood
and odd flesh may refer to the boarders around him living in his grandparents’ house,
as usurpers. These ones are dwelling a place which was formerly belonging to his
family. It is a comparison between his past life and the ones on the Earth in the
Mesozoic Era, then inhabited by enormous evil lizards which behaved much different
from the sort of animals which currently live in it, such as cats and dogs. The guests of
Ben’s house are also compared to the Dog and the Cat, simple domestic animals.
26
Personifying Time as God and joining both short stories together, the Reverend’s
explanation about God’s designs is similar to the one Lesperance tells time-travelers:
“He works in mysterious ways” (Bradbury, 2005: 36). Even if the safari guides in “A
Sound of Thunder” or the Reverend Clue are the people who lead the hunters or
worshippers, they lack the totality of the answers about what they all are dealing with,
Time and God. They only explain the little they know to satisfy the questions they are
asked. Since safari guides know very little about the factual working of Time as
Reverend about God, they all try to talk about that theme in a subtle way. They do not
want silly men e.g. Eckels or Ben to break their dogmas in order to experience whether
their beliefs are true or not. To avoid risks they want people to remain passive. As soon
as one person risks their missions, the guides and the reverend try to restrain such bad
attitudes, but in both cases the result is out of their hands.
The only answer Ben offers to such explanations is “‘Too mysterious for me,’ said
Ben, bluntly” (Bradbury, 2005: 36). This phrase does not have a clear context. It is
comparable to the ignorance Eckels have about the meaning and function of time order.
Ben is as ignorant as Eckels about the seriousness of following the norms that rule
Time. Despite this ignorance, Ben and Eckels alike have a disdainful or indifferent
attitude towards what guides are telling them. This is why their responses are blunt and
both stories have transformed endings.
27
3.4 Religious comparisons among the parents, the ancestors, the dinosaurs
In this short story diverse symbols appear which relate dinosaurs to Ben’s dead
parents. From the moment he relives the memory of the tragedy, he starts changing the
concepts of dinosaurs and Bible monsters:
He lowered his eyes. The boy’s parents, when he was ten, had vanished in a
storm on the lake. They and their boat were never found. Since that time, various
relatives had had to go down to the lake to find Ben yelling at the water and
shouting, where was everyone and why didn’t they come home? But he was down
at the lake less often these days, and more often in the boarding house here.
(Bradbury, 2005: 29).
The symbol of the drowned boat resembles the early prophet Jonah, devoured by a
whale which regurgitates him in a safe place, from the book of Jonah (Dufour, 1982).
Also it is very probable that Bradbury had already read Moby Dick by the time he wrote
this tale. However, another allegory, Noah’s ark, represents the boat; since it has sunk,
the living creatures in it did not reproduce later to give continuity to their species,
however, they had begot Ben before this. This is why Ben screams to the water hoping
his parents would manage to escape death, but as he is convinced they will not return,
Ben has decided to stay inside the house instead of near the lake. Right before this
passage he has defined he wants to become a dinosaur when adult.
According to the text, Grandpa wakes up in the middle of the night because he
feels that Ben is suffering a transformation into a dinosaur: “[...] they sank to vanish in
tombs of black tar, lost in the billion years that had summoned the old man awake”
(Bradbury, 2005: 44). However, departing from a scientific view, it is possible to affirm
that many fossils of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals have been found in tar pits
where they fell trapped and died. The drowsing dinosaurs are the cause men were
summoned to take control of Earth instead of them. Once dinosaurs become extinct,
mammals could evolve until the human kingdom appeared (Holtz, 2007). The religious
aspects are that the fall of the evil serpent into the hellish deeps is what allowed men
become conscious and awake to a new era (Dufour, 1982). After the Flood many giant
creatures were drowned and disappear to let the tiniest ones progress. In addition, the
bestial behavior was eradicated from Earth, either from animals or impious men
(Atienza, 1978).
In contrast with this previous idea, Ben is not afraid of beasts. Since they
28
represent his lost ancestors either their return to Earth or Ben descending to Hell are
actions that he is willing to live: “a thundering herd which, if they were not dinosaurs,
were sulphurous bestial first cousins. And all waiting in the fiery pits for Christian boys”
(Bradbury, 2005: 35). Beasts may trample human beings and take them to Hell as Eve
was tempted by the snake (Dufour, 1982). For Ben beasts/dinosaurs are godly pets
rather than wild pests, so he demands them to raise:
Oh, lost upon the Earth, but try to come again, good pets who once lay by the
foot of God and got tossed out for fouling the carpet, sound! Oh, great lap-beasts
of rolling mists and boiling fogs, whose voices are the trump of time that cracks
the gates and let the horrors forth, Sound!
(Bradbury, 2005: 37)
After the sermon, Ben has finally realized about two issues. One, dinosaurs and Biblical
beasts are related creatures, and two, beasts are not evil, but just huge pets of God
hidden away from him and knock the door as another pet does when trying to reenter
the house.
Inside they moved under the murals of beasts to gape at monsters so dandy it
knocked your wind out here they marveled [...]
(Bradbury, 2005: 31)
Inside the Cretaceous period, thanks the time machine/train, travelers are under the
huge past animals that dwarf them. Ben and Grandpa are also dwarfed by the skeletons
of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Dead or alive, with our without living flesh,
dinosaurs are so scary and amazing that they take the breath away from those who look
at them as close as they are. Dinosaurs are colorful, graceful but so terrible at the same
time that many contrasting emotions come together inside the mind of their onlookers.
They trotted over to be amazed, stunned, and awed by a pride of nightmares
painted by Charles L. Knight.
(Bradbury, 2005: 31)
The creatures the artist drew are so exact and well painted that they seem to be alive.
These creatures are precisely the ones the hunters (of “A Sound of Thunder”) found
during time-traveling. The paintings of Mr. Knight come to life as Time Safari Inc. (the
enterprise) takes customers there. The museum entrances have the function to drive its
customers to a trip back in national, natural history.
Without leaving the Earth, neither Illinois, people arrive to a place new for them
29
but (in the same ways related in “A Sound of Thunder”) ancient and primitive in reality.
These humans when looking at such scenes start shivering and trotting, scared and
surprised, happy and terrified by creatures that only live in their dreams to make them
spooky.
“Gramps, you ever notice? Look! This whole darn place, and no guys, no folks
from Green Town here!”
“Just you and me, Ben.”
“Only folks I remember from home here, a long time ago was” -the boy’s voice
faded to a whisper- “Mom and dad. ...”
(Bradbury, 2005: 31)
These words summarize space and time at once. The reality time-travelers know is not
current in the age they are in. The amazement Ben is expressing resembles the one of
Eckels when coming to the Cretaceous period. In both cases, there is not any people
(or people they know) from their place and time.
Ben experiences certain situations related to the time travelers’. The living beings
he finds in this new place are not the people that he knows by name, occupation or
address. Along the story similar situations appear about Ben’s house guests. Ben is
confined to his house and only knows his grandparents, pets and boarders. The
addition of Reverend Clue and his understanding of Ben’s faith show that Ben is very
distant from other people. His solitude is so extreme that society for him is not beyond
his house and scarcely his friends. Ben and Grandpa are the last survivors of the
Spaulding family. In addition, they both are the last members of the evolutionary chain
started by dinosaurs, the ancestors that Ben misses so much. The only peers he
remembers from home can be some names of a few dinosaurs he knows from the
books his grandfather gave him back home. Ben recognizes such shapes now, seen in
3D, physically not just from pictures and museum photos he had seen first.
After Ben went to the Field Museum and Grandpa gave him many books about
dinosaurs, he keeps relating in other ways to beasts, either prehistoric or mythical, as if
they were his direct ancestors: “And as he turned the pages of the great fat family Text
there were Leviathans and creatures of time” (Bradbury, 2005: 37). This book may be a
symbol of a photo album of his family or a book about dinosaurs. The families and
names satirized before are also symbols of the lineages of people described in the Bible
30
in Genesis or the second book of Kings (Dufour, 1982). In addition, the museum can be
a book, since it is a huge collection of ancient lore destined to be shown and preserved
to teach future generations (Dufour, 1982). For Holtz (2007) geologic strata are
upheavals of diverse layers, similar to the pages of a book, in which are concentrated
the various types of life through eras.
The books that Ben stores in the house are spread open to show the pictures of
dinosaurs in a series of unusual behaviors which causes Grandpa to imagine that Ben
may become a true dinosaur as he wanted:
For there in a panoply, a bas-relief, a tapestry, a museum explosion, were half a
hundred books, spread-eagled and butterflied, with dinosaurs grinning, lurching,
touching primeval mist with fingerprinting claws.
(Bradbury, 2005: 44)
The symbol of the book is also mixed by Bradbury with the symbol of the
butterfly. Given the connection of the butterfly in the short story “A Sound of Thunder”
(1952), this symbol establishes another source of intertextuality: “He turned and almost
stumbled over the litter of books put out on the floor [...]” (Bradbury, 2005: 44). It is a
comparison to the moment when Eckels falls off the path and steps on the butterfly.
However, Grandpa solves the spell by removing the books and prevents him from
smashing it. Grandpa relocating the “butterflied” books out of Ben’s room resembles
Eckels taking the dead butterfly away from its time and producing the distorted result. In
both cases, the expectations of the main characters in the beginning of the tales
change. Ben is not transformed into a dinosaur and Eckels cannot manage into
returning to the future safe and sound.
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3.5 Incidental symbols.
Not only is this short story related to “A Sound of Thunder ” (1952), but many
other symbols are related to “The Fog Horn,” (1951): “It was one of the boys in the lawn
below. ‘Ain’t seen you in weeks, Ben. Come on swimming’” (Bradbury, 2005: 34).
Beneath the tower of the lighthouse appeared a plesiosaurus (Bradbury, 2005). This
creature thinks the lighthouse is a pal or mate in the bay. The invitation to go swimming
in this other tale is perhaps the translation of the fog horn sound in the language of the
sea monster. Since the lighthouse is on the beach, the sea dinosaur is willing the tower
to swim with him. In this case Ben is not personifying a dinosaur but acting as either
McDunne or Johnny, up and inside the tower, looking down at whatever they might be
around. The call of the monster, as soon as it finds another member of his species is a
greeting, a polite invitation to join to its side (Bradbury, 2005). Since Ben’s friends
offended him the last time he talked to them, they come respectfully to ask him out. One
more time recalling “The Fog Horn,” Ben denied joining the boys, who decide to go
away and disappear forever or at least until this short story ends.
Along the short story the former name of Ben’s pet is replaced by just “Dog.” This
pet was originally called Rex. Holding this concept in mind, many of the actions the dog
performs resemble the description of tyrannosaurus-Rex in “A Sound of Thunder”: “One
dog led the way, the boys followed, snorting. ‘Dinosaurs? Ha! Dinosaurs!’” (Bradbury,
2005: 28). This quotation is clearly related to “A Sound of Thunder” and is one of the
first introductions of dogs in the story. This also shows how hunters pursue the dinosaur
in order to kill it. Moreover, this scenario resulted minimized in Ben’s tale, since a dog
leads the march of children to nowhere exactly. The second part of the paragraph
explains the supposed power men think to have over the rest of creatures. Ben’s socalled friends betray him and laugh at his ideas of becoming a dinosaur. Such treason is
as intense as the one of Judas towards Jesus or even Cassius and Caesar’s.
If this scene is maximized, such quotation reveals a premise: the overconfidence
of the time hunters who feel entitled to killing the tyrannosaur. They believe themselves
powerful enough to fight the tyrannosaurus and laugh at it before facing it. As soon as
they face the real-sized and living king of dinosaurs, their power of expectation lessens,
32
particularly Eckels’. Their vain glory and gun power weaken in such a dangerous age.
Their intromission threatens the destiny of Time and the human kingdom too. Their lack
of respect of natural laws leads them to a tragic ending. This usually happens in most
stories and in History as well. These adult hunters behave like children without control
or authorities to restrain their bad actions. Even if there is not any physical or
personified limit, trespassing any rule is paid back in the long term.
The transformations of the Dog/Rex are several in order to transfer the imagery
of a dinosaur from Ben’s transition to his pet: “For Dog was across the street, lying in
the middle of a field of clover and weeds, an empty lot where no one had ever built or
lived.” (Bradbury, 2005: 40). A tyrannosaurus Rex [previously this later noun was the
name of Ben’s pet] is roaming around a place in which nobody has ever lived and no
building has ever been set. It is compared to the emptiness and purity of the meadow of
the Cretaceous period in “A Sound of Thunder’s” Illinois. Clover and weeds resemble
sea weeds and the clover of Scottish/Irish meadows. Both kinds of flora together are a
memento to connect this tale to “The Fog Horn” because the living creature is whipping
and beating itself among such plants.
From the focus of the small time-travelers
related to tyrannosaurus, the plants it steps on are like grass. They seem themselves as
insects close to the Dog/Rex.
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3.6 Transformation of rockets into trains and the time machine.
The transformation of Ben and his dog are not the only changes happening along the
tale. The transportation Ben and Grandpa take to the Field Museum also suffers such
transitions: “A great beast arrived, a great wild monster took them away.” (Bradbury,
2005: 31). The train taking Grandpa and Ben from Green Town to the museum
resembles both the tyrannosaurus which is the reason the time-travelers have to move
to past and the time machine which is also a means of transportation. The time machine
is for time-travelers as an amazing object as it is for Ben. Giving an animal description
in motion and wilderness the train is emulating a factual creature that transports them
as a horse or elephant. As the train speed is apparently controllable, it is a metaphor of
how Safari Inc. can partially control the time machine but not any side-effect, as railroad
crashes.
The corpulence, size and volume of the steam locomotives are comparable to
those of Biblical monsters of such dimensions as behemoths and leviathans. This idea
also is directed to the whale which attacked and swallowed Jonah in another Bible
passage. The inclusion of this whale is a memory of Bradbury writing the script for
1956’s Moby Dick film. “The old man flinched under that pure sunfire stare” (Bradbury,
2005: 30). The amazement Grandpa feels when looking at Ben as he tells his plans is
similar to the ones time-travelers find looking out at the time machine. The time and
space twist and warp before their eyes and they are quite puzzled and unable to stop
the movement of the machine as it turns on its way to past. They all, Grandpa and
hunters cannot understand what are they dealing with in a few moments. They are
afraid and amazed by the uncertainty.
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3.7 VII The house as the symbol of Ben’s body
The house of Ben’s grandparents reenacts more than only one of the atmospheres in
which the tale takes place. It also figures as Ben physical body represented
symbolically. Cirlot (1969) argues that ancient wizards conceived the universe or
environment as a walled ark (which can be also Noah’s Ark or Covenant Ark), garden
(possibly Eden’s Garden, too) or house since it is a delimited space. Therefore it raises
a relationship towards the house and its dweller similar to body and soul. An inhabited
house features a dead body. Psychologically, the oneiric figure of a house represents
the psyche’s strata: its façade is the expressed, visible personality, sometimes a mask.
The upper stories of the building represent the head, thoughts and spirit. However, its
basement symbolizes the instincts and unconscious feelings and desires. The presence
of a staircase is the connection among the diverse body components which spiritually
ascend or descend. Finally, the kitchen, as both a location in which food is prepared
and as a feeding place, means a site of psychic transformation (Cirlot: 1969).
The transformation Ben suffers is not only changing his soul or body, but also it is
threatens his house to be demolished. Grandpa demands Ben to cease this
metamorphosis and removes dinosaur-related items from Ben’s room:
The magazines get shut, the books go back to the library, […] the dog comes
home from across the street, the cat comes down off the roof, […] No more
Field Museums, no more bones, no more dental smiles of old smiles, no more
shadow-shows on walls of cinema houses with great ghost of super-primeval
times. […] Otherwise the whole house will fall. The attic will crash down
through the bedrooms, through the dining room, the kitchen, into the cellar to
ruin the summer preserves and Grandma and me and the boarders with it.
(Bradbury, 2005: 48).
In previous passages, the presence of several books, magazines and journals all along
the house is described. This is a symbol of the ample knowledge Grandpa has acquired
along many years. Initially, the house belongs to both grandparents, thus the house is
mainly a symbol of Grandpa’s body rather than Grandma’s, whose place is the kitchen.
Since Ben will be the only heir of his grandparent’s properties, material and moral, but
not yet, Grandpa is counseling him to abandon his idea of becoming a dinosaur in order
to save their heritage from annihilation.
If Ben indeed transforms into a dinosaur, not only his soul and body will change,
the house will become ruins and will mash its dwellers. Ben’s transformation not only
35
will destroy the properties, it will also destroy his past moral heritage and his human
family will not exist since he might mutate into a dinosaur, more distant to humans than
Ben from his grandparents. Grandpa wants the dog to come back because this pet is a
symbol of a guardian against outer dreads to its owner (Cirlot, 1969). Moreover, the cat
is an Egyptian guardian of the underworld which is entitled to prevent its masters’ wild
instincts to invade this plain of existence (Cirlot, 1969). The cat has been up in the attic
roof to keep guard on Ben’s mind, where the wild instincts of fever are heading
Grandpa also closes his books to avoid Ben’s receives more information about
dinosaurs. According to him, this causes Ben to behave in deviant ways. This is the
reason why Grandpa changes all of the books about evil lizards and replaces them by
train texts and images. The feverish lethargy of Ben continues until the following
Sunday as a resemblance to Jesus returning back from the dead in order to join his
fellows. A final scene seems similar to the first one in which Ben tells his friends his
desire to become a dinosaur:
“Ben,” said Grandpa at last. “Besides a dinosaur, what do you want to be when you
grow up?” […] A train sighed off across the land, running on the rim of morning. Ben
[…] said:
“I think you know, Grandpa. I think you know.”
(Bradbury, 2005: 50)
However, instead of a sound of thunder coming from the sky to affirm Ben’s decision,
the whistling of an engine indicates that Ben wants to become an engineer when he
grows up. Instead of a thundering noise emanated by a heavenly-evil beast, the present
sound is expressed by another type of fire, adark creature, a train, ready to belong to
Ben’s long search for a life-time career.
As a conclusion, it is certainly very difficult to understand the tale “Besides a
Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” without having knowledge about
“A Sound of Thunder” (1953) and “The Fog Horn” (1952) in a lesser measure. Also
some data is required about the personal and professional life of Ray Bradbury which is
sometimes clear or subtly hidden along his oeuvres. “Besides a dinosaur, Whatta Ya
Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” recalls other short stories which happened in Green
Town. However, this tale, offers a new vision of this town without even leaving Ben’s
house or the meadow. The dinosaurs Bradbury/Ben loves and that used to be in his
36
mind come closer to reality through religious faith. Ben’s fever as a process to become
a dinosaur could have succeeded if Grandpa had not changed dinosaur books for train
books.
Finally, as a boy turns into a young teenager, he leaves his childish fantasies
behind to choose a manly occupation. As it happened to Bradbury, he replaced
dinosaurs by thinking of chrome-shinning machines and traveling outdoors. Ben and
Bradbury’s confinement ends with this short story. In the same way Grandpa ordered,
everything returns to normal as life and time keep their pace: Ben starts as a child and
becomes a clear-minded teenager; the dog recovers its former name and home and
Grandpa comes back to his uncertainty about life.
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4 Analysis of “A Sound of Thunder”
Synopsis: “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) is a story which includes the recycled concept of
time-travelling originally stated in The Time Machine by H. G. Wells in 1895. The story
starts in 2055, when a group of wealthy men travel back in time in order to hunt a
tyrannosaurus-Rex. Despite the cautions taken by the travel agency to avoid customers
cause any damage to Time and order, one hunter disobeys their rules and kills a
butterfly. Finally, the future has changed in terrible ways.
The setting is Chicago, Illinois in 2055. Later the setting is the same place, but at
the end of the Cretaceous period. Actually, the travelers never leave the building of Time
Safari Inc. Since they enter in the time machine of the company before their journey and
once they have returned the story finishes and they remain in the building, literally they
always stood inside the frames of the enterprise institution. The symbolic meaning of
Illinois, from a historic point of view, is that this state has produced many of the
important people of American History, Abraham Lincoln being one of them (Savelle,
1962).
The choice of Bradbury of this state may be not only the reason of being born
there, but also because this place has been wealthy and prosperous since it was
founded. Chicago is the setting of other stories he has written. One of them is “To the
Chicago Abyss” (1963): in the future, a nuclear bomb has erased Chicago from the
Earth. Survivors of chaos dwell a settlement around the great crater which the city used
to be. There an old guy wanders along the streets shouting about his memories during
the good times. Finally, once he is threatened of being jailed for public disorder, he
takes a train to leave behind this desolate place.
In addition, the tale “Besides a dinosaur, Watta ya wanna be when you grow up?”
(1983), previously analyzed in this study, includes a scene in which Ben Spaulding and
his Grandpa visit the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois to stare at the enormous
skeleton of tyrannosaurus-Rex. By the early 1930s, when this scene takes place,
Chicago is the biggest urban location in the Mid-West, and well developed to allow the
construction of such a cultural building (Savelle, 1962).
Historically, this area of the United States was originally populated by German
38
immigrants since the beginning of western expansion of the last 1700s until the 20th
century, this is clearly found in the last names of the characters. The presence of a
diverse historical context in this short story can be also considered symbolic, since such
facts are reenacted and mention along the text and their factual meaning must be
compared to the actions produced by characters.
In contrast, a Cretaceous panorama of Chicago is the place in which the hunters
travel to hunt dinosaurs. The historic importance of Illinois and especially Chicago, for
Bradbury, starts much more before this land was colonized by humans, since such
valleys already existed several million years ago: “‘Think,’ said Eckels. ‘Every hunter
that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois’” (Bradbury,
2005: 60). Illinois is the origin place of these hunters and now, in the Cretaceous period,
it is even older than the Africa in which the first human beings were born. Africa is
scientifically considered the cradle of humanity, its primeval place of origin.
If both names are changed in the sentence ‘Illinois seems Africa’, this statement
is fully understood. In addition, Eckels’ expression refers to the fact that Africa is one of
the most dangerous places to hunt in the modern world where they come from. Once
both places are compared, they consider that the wilderness and fierce of African
continent is smaller than Cretaceous Illinois. Paleontological researches are not enough
to describe the panorama they face now. This science has only researched the fossils
of long dead creatures, buried in barren badlands, but now they are in a fertile, living
jungle, features that science cannot explain.
39
4.1 Characters.
Before starting the analysis, the name of characters and their meaning must be
explained. The names are divided into two different spheres of meanings. Some names
have a German origin and others have either a French or American background. The
first one is Billings, one of travelers, makes reference to a birth-control measure,
Billings’ Method. It consists of counting days in order to calculate when a woman is
ovulating and prevent her from having intercourse during her fertile days of the
menstrual cycle and become pregnant. This control system can be easily followed
without needing any technological device such as surgeries or anti-conception
apparatus:
The Billings’ method consists of looking out the flux from vagina. After
menstruation are presented several days lacking of any kind of secretion, called
Dry Days. These ones are considered as safe days to have intercourse and avoid
pregnancy. Then comes a mucus-like secretion, opaque and dense which lately
becomes clearer and elastic (i. e. egg yolk); its raise coincides to ovulation period.
This means that sexual contact must be completely evicted. Finally, once such
secretion disappears, menstruation starts.
(Beltrán, 2002: 153).
Another feature about this surname may be the last name of an American songwriter of
the 18th century who composed some traditional songs (Savelle, 1962). In this story, this
time traveler and hunter, besides Kramer, obeys the rules for the journey determined by
Travis and Lesperance, in contrast to Eckels.
Lesperance is a French surname formerly written L’esperance, literally The Hope,
a Theologal Virtue (Dufour, 1982). In this story, Lesperance insists in telling travelers
they must obey his instructions to be safe and sound and to keep safe and sound Time
itself. If this scene is compared to American Revolution, French influences and helpers
were very valuable to have a positive and fair conclusion (National Geographic, 1976).
Lesperance is not a hunter, is a travel agent devoted to help them. Despite this,
disobeying Lesperance has a grave cost for History depicted at the end of this tale. The
presence of this character is also an allegory of American ethnic composition with
German, English and French roots symbolized in the surnames of other hunters.
Travis is another French name coming from the verb travailler, meaning currently
40
‘to work’; formerly this used to mean ‘to travel’ (Ancestry.com). In both samples his
function is working while traveling, a travel agent. He, as much as Lesperance insist on
the fact that travelers follow the rules to enjoy the trip in order to return safe and sound
and keep nature intact. In addition, this name belongs to one of the men who intervened
during the Texas revolution, William B. Travis who fought in The Alamo, in 1837. This is
a second name related or presumably taken from American History to confer a symbolic
importance to the characters, more especially because certain important moments of
the history of the United States are mentioned along the text; for example,
Independence Revolution of 1776, the War of 1812 as well as very important personas,
among them George Washington.
Eckels is possibly a misspelling of the abbreviation of Ecclesiastes, a book of the
Bible (Dufour, 1982). However, it is also an acronym of a German name (Ancestry.com).
This character is an antagonist since his mistakes damage world reality. Since he has a
German name in an American trip to the past, Time is inclined in favor to German
heritage on America rather than the Irish-English one, symbolized in the name of winner
president Keith.
Despite the fact of presidential candidates are not characters with a direct impact
in the short story, their names and attitudes are sufficiently narrated to establish an
interesting description of each:
Deutscher is the German noun for its national people (Ancestry.com). In this story
this character is the loser candidate of presidential elections before hunters travel back
in time. He lost the election because he wanted to establish a dictatorial policy and is
described by other characters as a tyrant which is against American freedom (Bradbury,
2005). Deutscher, according to English and its suffix ‘–er’ indicates a job, an occupation
and also the augmentative comparative. This could represent that Deutscher means
‘more German-like than Hitler and his dictatorship’s legacy’. It is important considering
that this tale was written less than ten years after the World War II, when Hitler and Nazi
crimes were widely known. Deutscher, a possible symbol of Hitler, is described by
characters as a tyrant. For instance, Napoleon and Julius Caesar are mentioned among
other tyrant leaders too. Tyrant leader or king is the literal meaning of tyrannosaurusRex (Benton, 1989), the central interest of the time-travelers of this tale. Also, Deutscher
41
is named anti-Christ by the manager of Time Safari Inc.
Keith is the winner candidate in the election before the hunters travel in time to
past. His name has two meanings. One of them, depending on pronunciation, rhymes
with Faith, a religious virtue (Ancestry. com), similar to hope, represented by
Lesperance. The second meaning, with a distinct pronunciation may proceed from the
last name of Thomas Kyd, a Classic English poet. This name, in addition to both
definitions, is a popular last name in eastern zone of the United States (Ancestry. com).
Depending on the governing functions inside the story, he represents current American
principles, completely opposite to those of Deutscher, who has German origins.
Deutscher is represented as the antithesis of Keith: if Keith is president of freedom and
peace, Deutscher means war and repression.
Kramer is another character of this tale. He is another hunter whose surname is
only depicted. This is also the surname of a German general of the World War II known
for his participation to eliminate and torture many people in certain concentration camps
(Holocaustresearchproject.org). Inside the story, this character has a little importance for
the plot, since him, as Billings, obeys Lesperance and Travis’ instructions and results
affected by Eckels’ incompetence when hunting dinosaurs.
It is also necessary the fact to include the tyrannosaurus-Rex as a character. Its
name means tyrant king of the evil lizards (Benton, 1989). By the time the story was
published, it was the biggest carnivorous animal which had ever existed. This idea
strengthens the meaning of its original name. This dinosaur is one of the most popular
and broadly studied of the fossil species, especially in North America, where it was
originally found (Holtz, 2007). Given that it was the king of dinosaurs, in this story it is
depicted throughout comparisons of diverse tyrant leaders. Despite its tyranny, this
dinosaur is also an allegory of Christ because many of its actions gain symbolic
meanings (for Gwinn, these actions are incidental symbols) similar to the ones of Jesus.
Finally the manager of the travel agency, whose name is never called, is certainly
a vital component of the tale, although his narrated actions and descriptions are too
scarce to set a personal profile instead of the average manager image. He tries to
sound as professional as a businessman of that class can be, but very stern in
comparison with his liberal political views.
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4.2 Christian, Roman and other western symbols.
“A Sound of Thunder” (1952) contains a cause-effect logic plot. Although it has
situations with a direct consequence on characters. Moreover, it is formed by numerous
allusions to western symbols, more specially Roman, Nazi and Christian icons. Time
travelers are depicted as Roman conquerors arriving to a wild land to show their power
over it. To achieve their goals, they must kill the current authority to impose theirs. They
have come to slay the tyrannosaurus, the tyrant king of dinosaurs.
Since time-travelers are scarcely sure when they exactly are, the agents try to
illustrate them by using western icons of history and power:
"Christ isn't born yet," said Travis, "Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk
with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up.
Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler none of them exists.” The
man nodded.
(Bradbury, 2005: 60)
Travis exemplifies their temporal situation by quoting the names of important leaders.
Some of them are both, kings and tyrants. Moreover, the Tyrant King is the etymologic
meaning of tyrannosaurus-Rex, the Tyrant King of all the terrible lizards. Rex is the
name of the highest ruler in the Latin language that explains why Travis mentions
Caesar, which translated into German, is Keiser, a high political rank in Germany before
the World War I. That means there is not any authority in this time but tyrannosaurus’,
the monster that Eckels and the rest of the hunting party has come to hunt. In this time
and place, the recently elected president Keith does not have any power to exert. There
is no God or nothing they could identify from their western culture, the one which vainly
glorifies of being the only one having the power to time-travel.
‘I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest.
Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life's short, When I find one
that's going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note
the exact hour, minute, and second […]’
(Bradbury, 2005: 64)
This passage is an allegory of Ben Spaulding’s parents. His parents lived a shorter time
than was expected and could only have one child. When they sunk in the dark lake and
died, maybe Ben wrote a precise minute and second in his mind. The few creatures
43
which live a long time, in that case, are similar to Ben’s grandparents of, unable, due to
their old age, to bear new children.
The concepts of reality and civilization that the travelers have are obsolete in this
area. However they must not alter its status quo because they have only come for one
definitive victim.
The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world
forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky,
and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of
delirium and night fever.
(Bradbury, 2005: 65)
This imagery contrasts with the tiny size and frail nature of the butterfly Eckels steps on.
Flying dinosaurs appear ugly, but the butterfly is depicted as beautiful. They are evil and
terrible, aggressive meat-eaters as the Lepidoptera [literally meaning scaly wing, as the
ones of pterosaurs, flying lizards, lizards are scaly] is harmless and has simple plain
habits. They are dark and twisted while the insect is the opposite. Killing the little
butterfly implies killing the beauty of the world, leaving only the wicked and fiendish to
flourish. This is the dictatorship of Deutscher, previously described. The immensity of
the jungle and its noise make the small presence of the butterfly invisible, which is close
the ground to as pterodactyls are very high in the skies. If we recall the adage of
Napoleon “a man’s grandeur is measured from his head to the sky” where these
monsters are, it must not be overlooked what is on the ground.
Dufour(1982) states that Early Christianity was called ‘The Path’ in the Acts of the
Apostles because Christians are sure they have found the true and only way to God and
salvation: “So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!" (64). The travel agents insist
that everything will stay right as long as the travelers follow their rules and remain inside
the path designed for their survival and safety. The fear they have to tempting the fate
by changing this time is constant, but this excessive caution increases Eckels’
cowardice, and he is really prone to panicking. The travel agents justify their extreme
care of Time by quoting more historical moments:
Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark
forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush
the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon,
across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross
44
the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all.
(Bradbury, 2005: 64)
However, a profound Anglo-centrism is seen in their speech. They find the supremacy of
Europe to be a negative idea, as if it were something disastrous for their future reality.
The History of the United States is the only important issue they want to preserve. They
do scarcely mention or care for the rest of the world. The triumph and prevalence of the
impious, unfair and anti-esthetic would be the rise of the East cultures. This is why they
must not permit any changes. Since the text was originally published in 1952, when the
Cold War was starting [after the World War II] before the Vietnam War, this can explain
the noticeable rejection to un-American and non-western affairs still latent in these
characters.
"Eckels flushed.”Where's our Tyrannosaurus?"
Lesperance checked his wristwatch. "Up ahead. We'll bisect his trail in sixty
seconds. Look for the red paint, for the Christ’s sake! Don't shoot till we give the
word.
(Bradbury, 2005: 65)
Tyrannosaurus is the only authority in charge during the Cretaceous period. This
authority is originated since the tyrannosaurus is the strongest carnivore of its time. It is
etymologically known as the king of all the lizards (Benton, 1989). At the same time,
tyrannosaurus is equal to Jesus as the Lord of all humans (Dufour, 1982). Since Jesus
is not born yet, tyrannosaurus is the only one in charge of this world. In addition to this
idea, time-travelers are similar to Romans; they have arrived to a place to conquer it.
Despite Roman precepts of cultural tolerance, time-travelers want to conquer and slay
dinosaurs. However travel agents do not want to do any damage to this land. These
agents must take care of the tiniest living being to the hugest ones. Similar to Romans,
hunters pursue the leader of these lands in order to impose their power through murder.
They are wealthy and powerful in their country, so they want to show this status in the
Cretaceous period.
Then two minutes passed since the second they arrived up to the moment they
face the tyrannosaurus. Hunters are beyond the two thousand years from the Death of
Jesus plus the time the machine was invented. The obvious clue Relating Jesus and
tyrannosaurus is the red paint on its chest. Red paint symbolizes for Dufour the blood of
Christ chest which was spilled by his pursuers, evil men (1982). In this case, this blood45
colored paint is spilled by Time Safari Inc. agents. The red color is a signal to distinguish
it from the rest of tyrannosaurus individuals or kings of lizards and follow it, in order to
hunt it, to its hour of dying.
There is an important, repetitive quotation in the tale “’Stay on the Path.
Stay on the Path!’” (Bradbury, 2005: 65). This cannot be taken literally but
metaphorically. It implies follow the teachings of the king or divinity they are
following. When Eckels falls off the unbreakable path he commits a bad action,
the ones who are against the teachings of Jesus and must have a long-time
consequence for all of them since the moment of his death:
Murmured Eckels. ‘Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made
President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they
don't exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or
thought of yet.’
(Bradbury, 2005: 68)
Eckels’ poetic speech seems to show he has already understood the logic of
time-traveling that his guides had explained. Sixty million years later they celebrate
Christ’s birth since president elections happened sometime after it.
Travis raised his hand. "Ahead," he whispered. "In the mist. There he is. There's
His Royal Majesty now."
A sound of thunder.
Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“Jesus God,” Whispered Eckels.
(Bradbury, 2005: 68)
The Royal Majesty of the western world is Christ, for the Cretaceous it is
tyrannosaurus-Rex. The monster coming one-hundred-yards far resembles that this tale
was written around 1955 (actually, in 1952), but takes place in 2055. If each yard counts
as a year, it would be similar to imagining the future, 2055, a hundred years
approximately from the time the tale proceeds, near 1955. Bradbury projects the tale
one century to future to bring men back to Past as much as time-travelers need a
century of yards to be close enough the tyrannosaur, the king of dinosaurs. In addition,
mists a hundred yards between men and the dinosaur can be mists of a cloudy and
unknown future for the author. As the king of men is Christ, the lizard is his homologue.
46
Watching the king of lizards is compared to watching the king of men. Watching it
walking on the lake, without sinking, is an allegory of the pace of Jesus on the water to
get near to his closest followers. The fact of passing among the mists, represents Jesus
pass on Earth among ignorance, showing his entire splendor in a world which belongs
entirely to him in the climax of his youth.
However, this action is an incidental symbol which recalls the pace of the
plesiosaur among the misty night waters of the sea towards the light house in “The Fog
Horn” (1953). It is very possible that Bradbury retook such a phantasmagoric imagery
for that later short story.
It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn't touch so much as one grass blade,
flower, or tree. It's an antigravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching
this world of the past in any way. (Bradbury, 2005: 60 )
The hunters’ purpose is not to leave any trace of their presence while the one of
the tyrannosaurus is to be contrastingly intense to their distance. They do not have any
right to touch or harm the Past. In the same way, Persephone was not allowed to eat or
touch anything during her stay in Hell; (Vasconcelos, 1972) if so, she would be
condemned to remain there forever. This happens when the time-travelers insist on
leaving Eckels in the Past as a punishment for walking away from the path. According to
religious aspects, whoever ignoring the rules of the cult is ejected and must go to Hell
for committing grave mistakes (Dufour, 1982).
Given to the fact that these hunters are experienced and wealthy, they tend to
boast about their deeds in front of others, but their present situation against the
tyrannosaurus-Rex shortens their past hunting, and they themselves are shadowed by
his ‘prey’:
‘I've hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but Jesus now, this is it,’ said
Eckels. ‘I'm shaking like a kid’
(Bradbury, 2005: 68)
Wild boar is a symbol that coarsely represented Napoleon, to his foes
(Heraldry.com). In addition, it is the heraldry shield of King Richard III, (Shakespeare,
1982). This symbol was also an offensive nickname that British use for both tyrants.
This icon also means the first food source for the first men in Europe. Tiger is an animal
47
that is very important for Asian nations for mentioned reasons, heraldry, food and cult.
Buffalo is the representative of American wildlife and the principal fountain of food for
Native Americans. Elephant is both, an icon for African cultures and their biggest food
source (Heraldry.com). Such animals exist also in Asian countries with the same
symbolic importance. The fact that Eckels has already killed specimens of these specific
animals means he has caused damage in all of the continents even before the butterfly
incident. This could indicate this character is prone to do the same on this occasion,
when he comes to kill the tyrannosaurus. If compared to this one, all of his previous
hunts seem dwarfed; they also do not have a consequence as deep as this one. The
last part of the phrase 'But Jesus now' exposes that travelers now, in the Cretaceous
period, are in search of The Galilean’s homologue to kill him. Eckels’ kid-shaking body
is notorious since he is in front of a celebrity which is enormous compared to them in its
physical and ideal dimensions. Physically, they are all dwarfed by its strengths and size.
Moreover the fame of the creature is also huge.
The travelers have come to demonstrate that the fame of tyrannosaurus
precedes him and is more powerful than Eckels’ will of hunting. In the same way it
happened to the Romans, despite their own ego, technology and power, the death of so
big an icon for this time shadows all of their hunting deeds. Hunters share this
admiration for their next slaughter into a wide cult: “It towered thirty feet above half of
the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily
reptilian chest” (Bradbury, 2005: 68) More than ‘thirty feet’ of tyrannosaurus height
resembles more than thirty years to the age of Jesus when he died. ‘Above half of the
trees’ is an analogy of the wooden cross on which Jesus died, which was not as tall as
full-grown trees. Jesus dies in the middle of his life. The rest of the remaining trees are
the symbol of people who live longer.
The delicate claws close to his chest resemble the classic posture of Napoleon
pressing his chest with his hand which appears in many portraits. The word
‘Watchmaker’ entitles him as master and creator of Time. It is a way to divinize him. The
name ‘Evil god’ can also change to ‘god of Evil’, as an idol of Evil followers, Safari Inc.
this company flourishes in West and is considered by Westerners as a fiendish force
against their social order. This explains why western authorities abhor and try to close
48
that company. If Safari Inc. promotes pursing of tyrannosaurus, this is their evil god or
icon. The same happened to Christ, dies thanks to the hands of their followers, the ones
who stood with him even after his decease.
As mentioned before Hitler and Nazism were a political force which developed in
one of the Western countries but the rest of them considered it a menace. This dread
not only shamed these nations in front of other countries but also they realized, since
the beginning that Nazis were a dangerous force. Many nations avoided their trading
ties, others abhorred it passively and others tried to vanquish it. Finally, once the
western threat in western lands was erased, an eastern one came to replace it along
the Cold War: Russia. It became a rival force which was neither Eastern nor Western
but seemed dangerous for the main interests of America (Savelle, 1962).
The symbol of a tower (Cirlot, 1969) represents strength, authority and
leadership, qualities broadly distinguished in this dinosaur. Such an image is also
depicted in “The Fog Horn”, being a lighthouse the figure of the tower and light
combined. The concept of light is closely linked to sight and eyes; this is why the
tyrannosaurus resembles a lighthouse: “Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can,
blind them, and go back into the brain” (Bradbury, 2005: 60). The eyes indicate
surveying and guard. Since this creature is the king of the dinosaurs, he must be a
permanent guard of his minions as much as Time, reflected previously in the
watchmaker’s hands. The action of causing the blindness of the dinosaur involves the
privation from one of his main senses.
The blindness of a giant has two symbolic examples. One of them is Poliphemus,
a giant Cyclops which was hurt in the eyes to allow Ulysses’ sailors to escape away
from his claws (Vasconcelos, 1972). The second token is Samson’s: the Philistines blind
him in order to imprison him and make him work chained to a millstone; finally, Samson
(described in The Bible physically as a giant man and morally adopts the charge of a
Judge) spends his last strength to push down the columns of the palace in which his
raptors stood and dies among them (Dufour, 1982). Ironically, this is what happens to
these hunters. They achieve to blind the tyrannosaurus to ease his death, but unluckily
the creature falls on the floating path before the tree falls, smashing him as well as the
rest of the time.
49
Previously the tyrannosaurus was compared to Jesus on his way to the Cross.
Samson’s life is, in several features, similar to the life of Jesus, since he was a Judge of
Israel and formerly respected by people before being betrayed and jailed. Samson also
suffers tortures and martyrdom before his death. Along his life, similar to Jesus, he was
taught to obey God’s rules in a more intense way than the average people because
both were chosen to be leaders, judges and saviors of their nation (Sagrada Biblia,
1980)
The titanic size and strength of the dinosaur are useless without the guidance of
his lost sight, so the coming chaos is imminent. Precisely, the lack of observance of
Eckels also leads him to fall off the floating path and commit the terrible mistake of the
butterfly. The wealth of Eckels is unable to prevent him from a simple mistake such as
falling, but Eckels’ fall is also representing either the fall of Jesus or Samson. Eckels’ fall
imitates the moment Saint Peter sinks in the water when Jesus asks him to follow,
because Saint Peter is not sure of his faith (1980). Although, Eckels’ fall in the mud may
be interpreted also as the fall of Satan out of Heaven, to the abyss or deeps, words
excessively repeated in Spaulding’s tale.
The tyrannosaurus, just because it belongs to that time and place has the rights
and duty to records his pace his realm:
It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing
damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.
(Bradbury, 2005: 69)
His foot marks are fifteen centimeters deep, precisely the same amount of length the
artificial path floats over the Young Earth’s ground to leave it intact. While he does such
destruction tokens along his pass, hunters also do theirs. It is not so important how
much caution they take, whatever they do has a consequence. In other words, if the
dinosaur is a type of god printing a strong signal on Earth, time-travelers, by avoiding
these actions, are devilish beings. This is because they perform exactly the contrary
that the leader, the king of lizards performs. They have already a strict, hard and
artificial track to follow, such as the Roman religion, but the path that the tyrannosaurus
50
builds is deeper, and endures over centuries because its footprints will become fossils.
It is similar to Jesus and his powers have no obstacles in their journey (Dufour, 1982).
The previously invulnerable path of men results broken as the king steps on it, as
Eckels steps on the butterfly. Jesus destroyed ancient rules in order to establish his
own, the New Testament overwhelmed many of the previous rules or paths to God
because Jesus is the truth, the path and the life (Dufour, 1982).
If certain expressions are literally understood, the divinization of tyrannosaurus
seems quite clear. The realization of Roman soldiers about the fact that Jesus was
indeed a god happened only until they were before his shadowing figure (Dufour, 1982).
“My God” Eckels twitched his mouth. "It could reach up and grab the moon."
"It can't be killed," Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no
argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The
rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. "We were fools to come. This is impossible."
"Turn around," commanded Travis. "Walk quietly to the Machine. We'll remit half
your fee."
"I didn't realize it would be this big," said Eckels. "I miscalculated, that's all. And
now I want out."
(Bradbury, 2005: 69)
When Eckels called “My God” it can be taken literally because they had followed
him up to this point and are astonished by his fame and size over their own as if they
worship him and were glad to follow him forever. The religious respect Eckels feels
towards the tyrannosaur leads him to affirm such statements. Eckels has the same type
of fear mixed with admiration and pain, as intense as the one Roman experienced
before, during and after having executed Christ. He admits his error similar to Judas’
and recalls his incompetence and regretting. All of the hunters already know the
paleontological evidence of tyrannosaurus, but only restrained to bones, not its pose
and behavior when alive. In such a key moment there is no place for regret or
miscalculations, less for retreat. In such moments any little error is fatal and opens the
chance only for unluckily options.
When Eckels figures out tyrannosaurus invulnerability, it is because he, Eckels is
astonished by its grandeur and omnipotence more than the other travelers. Futuristic
warfare technology seems to be insufficient for Eckels’ opinion in order to defeat the
king of the terrible lizards. In this aspect, Eckels’ cowardice resembles Judas’ (Dufour,
51
1982). However, it is different since Judas is rewarded after having sold Jesus and in
this story Eckels pays a lot of money to be allowed to time-travel to the Cretaceous
period and accomplish his caprices. He is tempted to break the check before the trip,
but his doubts and fear to failure and laughs from others at him force him to continue.
This dubious attitude is the throttle to the conflict and the disastrous consequences.
Moreover, since Judas commits suicide after betraying the man he had followed;
Lesperance kills Eckels because they will be banned from returning to the Cretaceous
period and solving the death of the butterfly and the changes caused to the reality
become impossible to repair.
The conclusion for “A Sound of Thunder” (1952) is that its religious symbolisms
include more complex meaning than “Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When
You Grow Up?” because this tale is closely related to Christ and the Roman Empire as
well as Western History. The actions and consequences are also linked to Christian
cosmogony, specially the New Testament. Bradbury has mixed science and religion in
this story with his poetic prose in a way both can stay together without place for
discussions or priorities of one over another. It is quite notorious that many incidental
symbols imitate those happening in the first short-story in order to show a broader
appreciation of each of them once that they are both known by the reader. Such
intertextuality not only reflects the repetition of actions and images, but also how
seemingly common actions can be interpreted as incidental symbols in these stories as
well as the rest of the writings of Ray Bradbury.
52
5 General Conclusions.
Finally, during this study, it has been explained that Ray Bradbury, considered a poet,
even if these tales are written in prose, applies symbolic contents of diverse
backgrounds to furnish dinosaurs with strong features beyond their scientific
description. He admires and depicts dinosaurs through views that other writers use for
current issues. For Bradbury, dinosaurs have heavenly features as much as Infernal.
Also, Bradbury has the ability to transform domestic places into those inhabited by
these dinosaurs and Vice versa. The attitudes and motion he confers to dinosaurs are
found in human characters, then he establishes diverse reasons to think both, men and
dinosaurs have the same capability for deviant or good actions.
53
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