The Martian Chronicles

Timothy is born during the war on Earth, but views it from a detached position, looking upon the Earth from Mars and imagining the cataclysmic war which devastated his planet as nothing more important than two flies battling to the death. The naivety of his youth is his gift in that he cannot comprehend the horror Earth’s war, nor is he afraid of the death around him on Mars. Timothy is on the cusp of a wider awareness, and the story depicts him perceiving the subtle fluctuations in his father and his mother’s moods. He takes the first steps toward his maturity, noticing that “everything was odd” (232) between his parents, and acting to rectify that by assuming some sort of leadership over his brothers.

William Thomas expresses indications of combat trauma, flinching at the notion of other rockets, at perceived motion in the sky, unable to focus on what is before him. He hides under the dock and fearfully looks about, later admitting he was only responding to his own fright. The brutal traumas of war weigh heavily upon him, though his sons don’t recognize this. They have normalized the behavior and are unsurprised at their father’s paranoia. He carries the weight of Earth’s past and has the choice of passing it on to his children, or allowing them to forge ahead, free of the prejudices and petty-mindedness that plagued Earth’s rules and regulations. His burning of the papers at the end is a statement that he is breaking the cycle of oppressive patriarchal rule that led Earth to its nuclear destruction, and therefore denying the forces that wiped out the former Martians and led to the collapse of the colonies on Mars.

The same weapon abhorred in “Usher II,” fire, and particularly, the burning of documents, is used to destroy the last of Earth’s civilization. William Thomas’ burning of the last Earth documents erases the work undertaken in “The Naming of Names,” and corrects the fundamental error the original colonists made, trying to graft Earth onto Mars in their nostalgic frenzy. The answer, Thomas teaches his sons, is not importing the customs and ways and faults of a different culture, but to create a new culture, one which will create different human beings, the next generation of Martians, who will be free of the faults human nature created on Earth.