Beyond the Letters

With Ray you never know what is real and what is imagined. This was supposed to be an autobiographical novel but Bradbury always leaves space for magic in his works, so the reader now is able to enjoy a good piece of fiction with autobiographical notes in it. “Green Shadows, White Whale” partially consists of stories reprinted from other collections, like “The Haunting of the New”, “The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge” or “Banshee” , and partially of new sketches describing the time Ray Bradbury spent in Ireland in 1953 when John Huston, a famous Hollywood director, invited him to work at the script for the screen version of Melville’s “Moby Dick” . For more than six months the White Whale has become a daily companion for the writer and a ticket to the country that he would favour for the rest of his life. “There is no figuring us,” said Finn. “We Irish are as deep as the sea and as broad. Quicksilver one moment. Clubfooted the next.” Ireland is a land of contrast an...

In Bradbury’s galaxy no world  shines brighter than the fourth  planet from the sun. Composition It is rather difficult to define the genre of “The Martian Chronicles”, perhaps, the most appropriate term for it is novel in short stories. The text of the Chronicles consists of two different types of stories – the main short stories that make up the major plot line of the work and something similar to intermezzi intervening with them. The latter are short, mostly plotless, sketches, which help the author to create the necessary atmosphere and the sense of a measured time flow, sometimes to describe the culture of Mars, but more often to show the interaction of Earthlings and Martians, the changes on the planet caused by people. The stories are arranged in chronological order, describing the period from 1999 to 2026, besides, each of them contains a character, an artistic detail, an action which connects it to other stories of the collection. Nevertheless, each part c...