Expressing solitude and nostalgia in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
Expressing solitude and nostalgia in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Summary/Abstract: Considered by many critics as a master of nostalgia, Ray Bradbury wrote about the future while reminiscing about the past. In The Martian Chronicles, his imagery and poetic descriptions, contrasted with simple and blunt ways of expressing feelings, create a futuristic universe in which humans seem unable to escape their contradictory fate: trying to escape the hardships of a complex and unfulfilling life on a planet on the verge of a nuclear catastrophe, they colonise Mars in a nostalgic attempt to return to a simpler existence, but constantly reminisce about their former life on Earth. This presentation aims to investigate the ways in which Bradbury renders this feeling of solitude and nostalgia for a lost past, by making use of an accumulation of images, sounds and movement which, paradoxically, create a deserted world overwhelmed by its own solitary fate.

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