Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes

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When it comes to time, there are 365 days in a year, twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute. As time ticks away, a person can never have their passed time back, not even a single second, but what if that was not true. What if a person could have their passed time back, becoming younger in the process. This is a reality in Ray Bradbury’s novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury plays with this idea of altering time and age with a magical carousel at a mysterious carnival; that as it rotates around can deduct or add time to a person's life. This is one of the many examples that Bradbury uses to relate to the idea of time or time passing. In Something Wicked This way Comes, Bradbury extensively …show more content…
This difference in time of birth relating to the differences of Will and Jim is one aspect of how time defines characteristics of the story. The theme of time arises again when the carnival arrives in the town at three in morning. Charles ponders why the train has come at that hour, and says “ Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep … But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out” (58). This idea that three A.M. is a menacing or bad time of night for man is significant. With three A.M. being a fearful time of night, and the carnival arriving at this time, it foreshadows that the carnival is evil or is something to be feared. It has arrived at a time where man is at his weakest, a time where a man is susceptible to the empty promises and false hope of the carnival. It’s also important to point out, that three A.M. is the time when “you’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying” (58). This notion that the carnival has conveniently arrived when a person is fearing death the most, points to the carnival wanting to feed off of a person's fear of death. The difference between daytime and nighttime in the novel is also important to point out. There is no reference to any bad things happening during the daytime, but as the sun sets the evil begins to intensify. At night, the carnival is at full swing, offering all of its empty promises to the people. It was also at night, when the witch went to hunt Will and Jim down to hand them over to the carnival. The differences in day and night are to symbolize good and evil within the novel. Bradbury uses time as a way to symbolize the differences between characters and develop a mood about certain times of the day. When he does this, a reader better understands the meaning of time and differences between times within the
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