In Ray Bradbury's short story, “Dark Were They and Golden Eyed”, a family of five arrives at Mars from the Earth to settle down and find a new life. Although they try to do everything they can to establish an environment as similar to Earth as they can, soon they notice and have to accept that they are going through irreversible changes and cannot maintain their old selves: they gradually turn into Martians.
For a close reader the most important tension of the short story becomes perfectly clear. Although Bradbury seemingly sets up the main conflict based on the differences between the “white” Earth people and the “dark” Martians, it is actually between the unimaginative and inspired, the ordinary and extraordinary, the conformist and nonconformist, the organic and technicized components that continuously fight their battle inside us and for us. Through describing a person's inner battle, and with the help of carefully but very purposefully chosen poetic devices, Bradbury shows us how much more meaningful and exciting to live a life filled with colorful fantasy and imagination – not unlike children's lives - than to insist on our safe but soul-destroying “white” existence. After all, “Maybe we're children, too”, “dark we are, and golden eyed. “
The road leading to our inner, innocent, child-like self is long and hard. Breaking all our safety-rockets does not help; the changes have to happen in us, deep in us to be final and irreversible.
Bradbury's short story can be divided into five pieces: a quasi prologue, three main parts and an epilogue. In the prologue the family arrives at Mars; the first main piece is from the devastating news about the atomic bomb on Earth to the rising of the green star; the second part ends with the father, Harry's ritual submerging into the canal; the final part is from the submerging to the total accomplishment of the transformation; the epilogue talks about the next group of Earth people coming to the planet to be supposedly lead to their “native” self.
The title of the short story, “Dark They Were, And Golden Eyed”, immediately poses some ambiguous questions causing tension. Who exactly are “they”? With the strange word order Bradbury puts a very strong emphasis on the adjectives and places them in the foreground of our perception. Dark usually refers to something bad, suspicious, unpleasant, while the color gold is a symbol of light, rich, sparkling, pleasant. How can somebody be good and evil at the same time? Or is it possible that either of these adjectives is used with an unfamiliar connotation?
In the prologue we meet the protagonist and his family. They live a “clean, decent” life on Earth; however, one day they feel the urge to leave it behind, “come over sixty million miles” to Mars. Although they are still not aware of what it is exactly that they are after, and why they feel their lives are unsatisfied and unfulfilled on Earth, the author already gives us several clues to ease this tension. They arrive with children, who are like “seeds, might at any instant be sown” (567) and eventually develop into a brand new plant. There is not too much doubt what is going to happen. Bradbury uses expressive similes with organic imagery to describe the life-changing experience the family is going to go through: “the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum” (567). “The wind blew as if to flake away their identities” (567). “At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone” (567). Right in the beginning the author introduces several of the short story's main symbols: the wind that accompanies the hero all the way to the end is a well known and frequent public symbol of change. Something old is always “gone with the wind” and something new and exciting arrives with a new breeze (and stays until the wind changes). Through the implied meaning Bradbury suggests that these changes are going to be for the better.
Another very important element, color, also appears in the prologue. The two most prominent colors of the text are being introduced in their symbolic senses. “[T]he Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone” (567), Bradbury writes, depicting the hero's old life as “white”. The children's hair is “yellow” - the simplified color of gold. Linking “goldness” to children foreshadows the symbolic meaning of the golden-eyed existence; after all life on Mars – according to Bradbury's description – is evidently childhood-like, innocent: “They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children's delicate bones” (567).
The third leading symbol of the story is also in the prologue. “The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of the Martian sky” (567). Indeed, we need to dig deep to reach our inner child-like innocence, when we were still without inhibitions and full of imagination and fantasy. The good news is, says Bradbury, that not only we possess the desire for a more imaginative and meaningful life (“a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in”), we also have all that is needed within us to realize it, to make it our reality. Although our “marrow” (fantasy, imagination) is locked up, surrounded by “white bones” it can be released and rescued; however the process to set it free may be a very long and painful process.
Interestingly enough it is only in the first part of the text's main body where we hear the family's name first time right in the first sentence. “Their name was Bittering” (567). It is a telling name: including an adjective (bitter) with an -ing ending suggests a “verb” that describes both its bearers' character and their most characteristic action. It is another clue about their not having been happy in their previous lives on Earth.
Comparing to the other main divisions of the story this section is the longest one; the lengthiness suggests that the road Harry Bittering is taking so that in the end he can arrive at a more satisfying although totally different way of life is full of inner pitfalls and uncertainties and indeed, takes a long time.
He does not see his destination still and he does not know if it is worth the struggle. Although he instinctively knows it is “time to get up” (568), he is full of fears all the time: “the fear was never gone” (567). He is “drenched in the hotness of his fear” (569). He constantly tries to convince himself of the opposite (as if testing his strength): “We do not belong here. We're Earth people. This Mars. It was meant for Martians”(568). He meticulously insists on his old-life routines: he plants a garden, gets up at seven o'clock, goes to “work”, reads the Earth paper every day. The decision of his Mars adventure seems like a certain kind of a game, a “survivor show” until a dramatic event happens: there is no way back. “Atom bomb hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!” (569) With this event Bradbury puts his characters in a situation when they have no choice. In other words, their old, ordinary, boring, “white” life is over for ever. There is no other way than going forward. That is to say, there is no other way then just digging deeper and deeper into their “Martian world” that in the text represents a child-like, innocent, colorful, peaceful and content life. There is no other way than just being happy again just like we all used to be as children.
The road is long and hard but Bradbury does not leave his characters by themselves. From their very first breath on Mars there is a mysterious phenomenon with them, the wind that helps them through the probing times. In the prologue it cools them down and gives them (and the readers) the first clue about the changes they face. It always reminds them of the existence of their inner self, the destination of their journey. When they have doubts (“But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul!” 568), the wind immediately reacts, and does so very prominently: “A river of wind submerged the house” (568), windows “rattling”. When they learn the news about Earth (which is the actual beginning point of the main tension of the story), and they are all devastated, the wind is there at once to console them and at the same time show them a possible (the possible) way – the creative, imaginative life - out of depression: “For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon” (569). It is there as a manifestation of the Martian (meaningful) life, whenever the doubtful, hesitating, confused Earth people need strength and reassurance. “Are you up there? All the dead ones, you Martians? Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We're helpless!” (570) And down it comes and moves them out of their misery. It calms down only when the work is done, in the third main part of the story, and the “quiet autumn” replaces the chaotic, loud and hot summer.
Bradbury uses quite a few poetic devices to convince the reader about his truth. One of the most obvious devices is repetition. The function of the repetition of certain words and expressions is not just calling attention to an important fact, action or feature but also to make the text's central idea stronger, assuring the text's organic unity this way as well. “No way back. No way. No way” (569). The repetition plays out on the action level too. If Harry gets uncertain he keeps going to “work”: “Work, he thought, work and forget” (569). There are also lots of “lists” with the same function and role. Often the lists contain repetitions as well: “Sweat poured from his face and his hand and his body” (569). “himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, alone” (576). Whenever Harry is in an especially devastated state and almost loses his strength and sanity, he talks to himself in very short, simple, repetitive sentences that snap one after the other as if he tried to convince himself with a series of short, sharp slaps. “Think. Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth...” (570), “He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching”(570). Bradbury uses the garden imaginary in a strange, defamiliarized sense: usually we connect positive phenomenon to gardens; gardening in literature very often means growing and cultivating our intellect, reconnecting with nature, with organic elements. In Bradbury's short story the garden is the symbol of the Bitterings' old, monotonous, dull, unimaginative life. It is a place where Harry keeps returning to maintain fractions of his Earth self.
The colors in Bradbury's short story also have enormous importance and expressive strength as they carry very heavy symbolism.
The old, left behind world is white. It is the color of oversimplified boredom, transparency (as in: not complicated with shades), everything that is ordinary, empty, mundane. That is the life the Earth people come from. This is the color they try to establish around themselves: “They built a small white cottage” (567). The wind of change sweeps out the colorlessness and fills the “center of a vacuum” (567) with colors. Lots of colors. When the transformation really gains ground, everything and everyone is being saturated with bright colors, similar to a free drawing of a child bursting with happiness and light-heartedness. “...changing through the old peach tree [peach as a color, not just the fruit], the violet grass, shaking out green rose petals” (571).
The second most important color in the list is definitely gold (or its frequent representation, yellow). In the beginning of Bradbury's text golden-yellow is undoubtedly and purposefully connected mainly to children. The Bittering children arrive at Mars “with their yellow hair” (567) strengthening the short story's main idea: the creative, imaginative, fantastic features that give meaning to our life are carried by the children in a “white” world until they lose them and they, themselves become “white” adults. The children are not just the only ones who possess the seed of being “yellow” or “golden-eyed”, but they are the first ones who sense and notice and know the changes both in the environment and in people too. They are the first ones who bring up the possibility of some kind of Martian existence: “Maybe there're Martians around we don't see. Sometimes nights I think I hear 'em” (568). And they are the first ones who adapt to the new situation by demanding new, “Martian” names for themselves.
But the golden color is not restricted to children only. The first thing that goes through a transformation in people is their eye. The eye is the mirror of the soul – as the saying goes. And if it is so, there is a part in everyone's soul that – according to Bradbury – still possesses our inner, playful child. We just have to find our Martian wind that brings it out from the deep. Golden-yellow is the color of the sun, the huge, hot, bright star that gives us light, warmth, the source of all existence. In Bradbury's story golden-yellow is the symbol of being different, being exciting, being extraordinary. At this point we are again at the center idea of the text: this extraordinariness, this excitement that manifests itself as imagination and fantasy, is not less than the essence of our life. “Mr. Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold” (573), Bradbury writes. It is an intriguing simile indeed: the very intensive, aggressive physical transformation, that suggests some kind of pain, suffering, is connected to the color gold. However, it has been quite clearly established that in this text gold has positive, pleasant connotations. What nature is, after all, such a huge change and transformation? Bradbury makes sure the feelings, impressions and descriptions of the ongoing change leave a very positive aftertaste in the reader. Changing (back) to a world filled with imagination is good. It is desirable. Even if it does not seem so at first: when he speaks about the Martian new world, Bradbury uses a seemingly cruel metaphor in which the beast of change devours its victim: “What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them” (569). But this metaphor is embedded in sensually pleasant context, making it very ambiguous: “Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters” (569). Gingerbread cookies smelling like cinnamon, accompanied by wine in harvest time...What is all this if not a reminder of memories of our sweet-smelling, fragrant childhood? Should we stay away from a change like that? Bradbury does not think so. It is not bad, it is not cruel, only different and maybe surprising, says Harry himself: “Onions but not onions, carrots but not carrots. Taste: the same but different. Smell: not like it used to be.” (571) Cora, Harry's wife agrees: “Look all right to me” (570). It is not just right, it is “native”, it is natural, it is evident: “You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It's quite natural. Imagination” (568).
The change saturates the Earth people's senses: the colors change, tastes are different, voices die out and quietness takes over, smells are “not like it used to be”, digging “fingers in the earth” does not feel the same as it was before. Bradbury uses synaesthesia to express the chaotic (but exciting) mixture of senses: cinnamon dust, wine airs, green silence dance around the people entering their old-new lives.
This section of the story ends with an allusion: “A green star rose in the east” (574). It refers to Jesus' birth in the New Testament. The pivotal placement of such a well known and strong reference-image suggests that the chain of the events has gotten to a turning point. The birth of Jesus, the Savior means the transformation, the rescue (“saving”) is getting rooted deeply in Harry at last, probably for ever and irreversibly. Indeed, this is the moment when “a strange word emerged from Mr. Bittering's lips” (574). This is the very first linguistic element in a long line of Martian naming words that occurs in the story. And a very important one. We learn that Iorrt, the word that Harry utters after the portentous star appears is “the old Martian word for our planet Earth” (574). The pioneer of the upcoming names “emerged” from the depth of Harry Bittering. The verb “emerge” definitely has an image of upward movement. Apart from the depth of Harry's inner self the direction refers both to the act of redeeming (through the allusion of Christ's birth) and concretely, to the height of the surrounding mountains where the remnants of the ancient, buried Martian life can be found. This is the event that starts the ceremony of naming and renaming things and people in Bradbury's short story, although we have already learned earlier the importance of names. “He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks...Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas…In spite of this, the Earth Men had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys” (570). Growing up, we leave our childhood behind together with its language. Our language “grows up” too, as we feel we need to find rational sense in the universe including its signs, the words. The act of naming is a very symbolic step: it gives things and people identity. By taking away the Martian (“childhood”) names and replacing them with the Earth Men's (“grown up”) words, Martian life has lost its essence, its child-like quality in the name of “rationality”, “seriousness” and “adulthood”. With the transformation getting close to its completion, the elements of the environment return to their original, “native” states by reclaiming their old names. These new-old names do not make “sense” linguistically to the adult Earth Men (and Women), just like a newborn's cooing cannot be identified with any traditionally formed “adult” words. With this choice of linguistic elements Bradbury's reminds the readers again of the meaning of his Mars metaphor that is surrounding the central idea of the text.
The next main part ends in another very strong biblical allusion. Harry Bittering submerges in river (canal) water so that he can emerge as a newly born, changed, transformed man. The image can easily be traced back to the Christening scene of Jesus. By baptism the protagonist becomes, is converted to a new, innocent person. He frees himself from his previous life and sins. The paragraph that describes the scene in Bradbury's story is one of the most important parts of the whole text. It is full of figures of speeches with definitely positive connotations suggesting something wonderful, desirable and peaceful has happened. Bradbury uses synaesthesia (“green silence”) to express the complexity of the almost overwhelming experience; brings back a previously established color symbol in a simile: “let himself sink down and down to the bottom like a golden statue” (575); takes a metaphor (as a contracted simile) to picture the tranquility that fills Harry (“water-quiet” as opposed to the wind's constant howling in the previous parts). When Bradbury writes about the process of the change he tends to use very strong and aggressive nouns and verbs of action (the rocket's “lid gave a bulging pop”, the wind is rattling, Laura, one of Harry's children, is dashing onto the porch with bad news, the children are running out “in time to see their father hurrying about the garden”, the situation is called a “crisis”). In this paragraph he does the opposite: everything slows down, taking time: “A few tremblings shook him, but were carried off in waves of pleasant heat” (575). It is not dark under the water, on the contrary, he sees the light, he is enlightened, he is enchanted – he is transformed. An oxymoron (“He saw the sky submerged above him” 575, - submerge/above) emphasizes two features of the experience: it is indeed an overall and overwhelming surrounding and at the same time it is elevating. The event takes place in the deep, where “all was peace”, where all our buried dreams exist. Although it happens underwater, it is not suffocating like the “other” world. When he emerges from the water he gets his new (“Christian”) name (utha) as a manifestation of his new identity. It is given to him by his son – a child figure, hinting at a new, innocent, promising, exciting era of his life in which he needs to build himself again, cell by cell, but this time with lively, thrilling colors from his deeply buried self: “If I lie here long enough, he thought, the water can build on that skeleton – green things, deep water things, red things, yellow things” (575).
In the epilogue, that takes place five years later, the old, Earth life appears again on Mars, in the form of a rocket that “fell out of the sky” (579). Together with it returns the characterization of the “white” life. The newcomers speak in the usual short, concise sentences of the Earth Men (“Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly” 579), nothing unnecessary albeit nice and amusing pleasantries and extras. The main value of them is constant, monotonous, rational and effective work: “Lots to be done, Lieutenant…The work, all the work” (580). Their viewpoint is definitely “adult”; they see only “ruins” instead of villas with marble floors and refreshing swimming pools in the Martian settlement. Bradbury uses irony to describe and characterize the absolute unimaginativeness of the rocket men. When they are engaging themselves in naming the environment on Mars (and by naming they think they can take possession of it), the captain claims that it “calls for a little imagination” (580). But the given names are the same as always, there is no innovation, or fantasy, or playfulness present at all (Lincoln Mountains, Washington Canal, Einstein Valley).
Everything starts again, and we can just hope we know what will happen with “the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and… the soft wind in the air”... (580)
Dark they were, and golden-eyed, indeed.
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Work Cited
Bradbury, Ray. “The Stories of Ray Bradbury.” Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 567-80. Print.
