Preview

The Illustrated Man Analysis

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
480 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Illustrated Man Analysis
Thought Paper on “The Illustrated Man”
“The Illustrated Man” by Ray Bradbury is a marvelous book that immediately pulls you in. This book is about a man whose body is covered in “living” tattoos, but the strange part is that his tattoo’s tells stories of the future. The book isn’t a story about the man himself, but a book about his tattoos; it is 18 stories compiled into one book. Bradbury’s book tells interesting and imaginative tales about the very eerie future, about space and Martians, and about death.
The first story in this book is the one that interested me the most. The reason it stood out to me more than the rest is because it doesn’t talk about space, or Martians, but of the eerie future. This story tells of a future where people don’t have to do anything, the machines do everything for you, and your imagination can dictate what happens.
…show more content…
Martians. These two things are the majority of the book. Some of these “space” stories were interesting but after a little while, reading about space, Martians, Mars, and Venus became just a little boring. The excitement seemed to fade with each story.
I love how Bradbury used his words in “The Illustrated Man”. Some of the sentences were so descriptive I felt like I was there. “The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish.” (Bradbury, 19) .Those two lines from the story “Kaleidoscope” are my favorite. Those lines immediately pulled me in and didn’t let me go until the end of the story.
Death seemed to be the main subject in this book. “Johnson fired his gun three times more. . . They ceased struggling. There was a terrible silence.” (Bradbury, 137). In every single story, someone always seemed to die. Whether it was from hatred, natural causes, rocket crashes, or murder, death was always present. I know death has to happen, but this book took death to the extreme and cannot say that I enjoyed reading about

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Ray Bradbury focused on multiple craft moves, similes, descriptive words, and foreshadowing to give readers a painted picture in their mind while reading and to also be able to predict what will happen in the end.…

    • 342 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the book, A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller takes an interpreting job at a community college in Los Angeles, California. On her first day, she finds a young man named Ildefonso who is around 27 years old with his arms tucked in and his head following the each student as they passed. Schaller sits with the young man and tries to talk to him, thinking that everyone in the room could understand sign language. Schaller learns that Ildefonso, an illegal alien from rural Mexico, deaf since birth had no concept of language—signed, spoken, or written. At first, when Schaller would sign to him, he simply mimicked her signs, which frustrated them both. After working with…

    • 850 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    intriguing story that keeps the reader's attention the whole time. Using the anecdote puts the reader at the scene as if they watched the events take place right before their own eyes, allowing the reader to see a ‘major life event,’ death.…

    • 399 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This book has major American values and social conflicts that many can still relate to today. Overall the book was a great read and was very interesting to know that it is a true story and seeing how Capote interpreted it was nice. The modern time fame provides an interesting style that occurs in the book as…

    • 1172 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ray Bradbury’s pristine writing, significant themes, and flow of writing inevitably define the masterful piece of work that Bradbury is trying to portray to his universal audience. The novel starts with an empty, dark world and ends with hope for rebirth of a new civilization with unique individuals who become literal passages of books themselves. Bradbury’s effective writing resonates with the readers as he personifies the book for a living creature capable of humanistic influences. The endless love of literature that Bradbury possesses is clearly apparent in many memorable lines of his novel…

    • 624 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Parents of two children decide to shut off the automated nursery, against the childrens wishes. When the nursery is shut off, and the children go into a fit of rage, they are allowed to play in there one last time only to lock their parents in so the loins can eat the them.…

    • 762 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Just as poetry is a permanent mark of feelings that last forever on paper, tattoos are permanent symbols that last forever on the skin. Tattoos and poetry can easily be combined such as in Kim Addonizio’s sonnet, “First Poem for You,” the speaker admires her partner’s nature themed tattoos in a darkened room. This may seem to be a simple poem, but by utilizing tattoos as symbols, including tactile and visual imagery in her poem, and using the sonnet as her structure, Addonizio laments about the true meaning of relationships and their longevity.…

    • 614 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Imagine spending all of your life behind a typewriter in the realm of imagination, clicking away to create a sense of feeling on paper for those who are willing to read it. It may sound boring and like a waste of time, but this is what Ray Bradbury did as a career. Even through growing up in the Great Depression with all the hardships that arose, he created many science fiction works that are enjoyed by young teens across the world. Bradbury’s short stories, “A Sound of Thunder” and “The Long Rain,” contain topics concerning the human mind, technology, fantasy, and science about which Bradbury theorized during his life.…

    • 818 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gloria Bird’s writing and Sherman Alexie’s writings were my top favorites out of this folder. Turtle lake was a funny, entertaining read. I couldn’t help myself from picturing the stereotypical group of men; with all of them making fun of one another and causing ruckus. The Stick Indians is such a childish fear and I think that is what makes it so terrifying. Knowing that they should not scare you, yet they do; using your imagination against you. The…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Kennewick Man Analysis

    • 1123 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The significance of the Kennewick man to Native Americans is that they desire to label it as one of their ancient ancestors, and honor it in the customary fashions typical of their people. The significance of the remains to the scientific community,and particularly the archaeological field, is that from the established institutions and their documentation of prehistory, this being should not have even been in this location! The accepted accounts of mankind and evolution would say that this skeleton, should it be excavated, should come from a European or Asian country, as it bears little resemblance to any native tribal peoples, who we have been taught were the sole occupants of what is now the United States of America, before the arrival of Columbus.…

    • 1123 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Ben Bova's Grand Tour

    • 1088 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Most of the novels of the series are bout the exploration of a planetary moon or particular planet. Many of the celestial bodies that are explored in the novels are shown as having had or having life. For the most part the expeditions sent out into space encounter serious challenges with the protagonists starting out as lacking in ability and confidence. They grow in character and confidence through their experiences to end up as heroes when they complete their mission successfully. The future of humanity is depicted as being a struggle between religious fundamentalist and scientists/secularists and the wealthy industrialists versus the environmentalists/greens. The conflicts are often introduced at the start of the narrative and will often be a background story throughout the book. One of the most important themes of the novels is the struggle between independent operators and wealthy industrialists for the vast untapped mineral resources in the solar system. There is also constant search for life on the different moons and planets being explored. Leviathans of Jupiter, Titan, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars Life and Mars all focus on the issue. After the explorers find life on a given planets what usually follows is a struggle between the scientist and religious fundamentalists with the latter denying its existence as it is in…

    • 1088 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, Erickson has done just that. Creating five masterfully written short stories that captivate and excite readers, drawing them in and never letting go. I’m not choosing a favorite, since choosing a favorite would be like choosing a child and I love them all. I would say they are like reading short “Twilight Zone” excerpts only a thousand times better, more into the depths of Wells and other amazingly great sci-fi authors. There is something here for everyone, intriguing storylines that create underlying meaning and complex realities that lead to thought-provoking equations making this one book that will remain with you long after you’ve finished.…

    • 201 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout this journal, one can question why the author wrote the book from the perspective of death and what will happen to Max Vandenburg. Initially, there is the question of why the narrator of the novel is the entity of death. One answer to this question is that writing the book through death’s perspective is both creative and different. Having death speaking personally to you on the first page is a unique draw-in. There are no other books popularly known that can claim to have such a narrator, which makes it stand out from its competition on the bookshelves. As the New York Times states in a review for the book, “brilliant… It’s the kind of book that can be life-changing” (Zusak). This quote clearly shows that the author’s decision in having death be…

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rifleman Dodd

    • 516 Words
    • 3 Pages

    There's a lot of brutality and death in it, and that's to be expected because it depicts war realistically and unsentimentally. An odd thing about this book is that it depicts all the same events twice, alternating points of view between Dodd and a handful of his French counterparts, a group of boyhood friends from Nantes following their pal Sgt. Godinot. They're really just boys yet--decent enough kids, appealing characters, you really feel for them. And of course Dodd has nothing against them personally; it's just that he cuts them all down one by one (more or less by chance) in his struggle to survive and to get back to his regiment. You really feel the heartbreak of being a French soldier at that time. And the final fate of Godinot is so bitterly ironic that it's practically tragic, though with the cold indifference toward human life that is a part of warfare, the crowning irony is that Dodd never even knew…

    • 516 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “The man in the black suit” is a frame story, which is a story inside another story. It consists of this “very old man” telling a story about how the “devil” came to him in the woods one day when he was “only nine years old”. Writing it down, he believes, that “someone may find” what he wrote but more importantly he believes that it will give him “freedom” and some “sort of release”.…

    • 399 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays