Ray Bradbury: Final Thesis

Obviously, if you have read my last post, you know that a legal free copy of this book is not available online. I mean just look at it. It's hard enough to find a pic of this book. Anyhow, it is a hard read, and as it sometimes happens, I was late in reading it, and could not submit the final thesis for this book. But worry not my friends, I always have my views for you right here, beyond that 'Read more' link down there. Shall we?

Through this thesis, I wish to explore the concept of cyclical time as proposed by Ray Bradbury in Night Meeting, in The Martian Chronicles. The concept that the most enduring of structures can't escape the advent of time is common, but the concept that what is will cease to exist, only to come back anew, in not so common.

The old man that Tomaz Gomez meets tells him how everything in Mars is different, and how that is why it is the right place for him, because time never stops, and for him, different is the only new. He of course, refers to the difference between Earth and Mars. When Tomaz then meets Muhe Ca, a martian either from a thousand years his past or his future, the stark difference that time can have on the same planet is also highlighted.

However it is in the ruins of the martian city that we get a clue of the concept of cyclical time that Bradbury plays with throughout this book. The ruins are proof for Tomaz that he must be the future, and Muhe Ca the past, but then Muhe Ca asks him how he does not know that the ruins he sees are those of his own civilization from centuries in the future built again by Martians. There is enough ambiguity to suggest that time is not linear here, while the human says it is 2002 AD, the martian claims it to be 4462853 SEC, neither of which have a common frame of reference.

But whether one is the future or the past of the other is immaterial for all practical purposes, since they are but ghosts to the other, and it is only their own world that is accessible to them.