Laughing At Death

Ray Bradbury’s fantasy thriller Something Wicked This Way Comes1 is perhaps the best book I’ve read this year, and I’ve been endlessly intrigued by its lyrical language, vivid and horrifying characters, and profound insight, which, upon reflection, is deeply consonant with the biblical idea that the universe is fraught with principalities and powers that tempt and seduce human beings into slavery and idolatry. Bradbury gives us a picture of sin, death, and the temptation of immortality in a dark travelling circus full of mysterious attractions, led by “Mr. Dark,” and he does it through the eyes of two children: Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway.

One of the questions the book seems to be asking is how we can fully live with the knowledge of our mortality—with Time, and the internal anxiety that comes with being psychosomatic unities as human beings. It is my intention to discuss how Bradbury’s book is deeply consonant with Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of sin and temptation as expressed in Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance, by Terry Cooper. In addition, writing meaningful fiction deals with death as essential subject matter, but, if we apply J.R.R. Tolkien’s notions of “eucatastrophe,” we can say with the anonymous writer of Hebrews, “He Himself likewise partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14-15, NASB).

I’ve thought a lot about death over the past two years, and have thought perhaps more about how we deny death. Social media, politics, celebrities, food, coffee, drugs—there is only so much addiction we can indulge before miserably recalling that none of those things can deliver us from the vulnerability of being a mortal human being. My aunt passed away quite unexpectedly, and one of my father’s best friends died a couple months later. Just recently, a girl from my hometown died after spending five years in a coma. I remember her being one of the liveliest and joy filled people in the community, and after her car accident, the whole town came together in prayer over her life.

Most of the time, these thoughts of dying produced a kind of hectic impulse to be productive, or an inability to process the inevitability of death in a way that didn’t lead to losing myself in distraction. I don’t have a lot of time, I thought. Have I already missed it?

Reading Something Wicked This Way Comes in conjunction with Sin, Pride, & Self Acceptance by Terry Cooper yielded some timely realizations of the need to accept our vulnerability, and additionally, how story can order our understandings of these matters so we see our lives redemptively. Bradbury’s book is the story of what happens when we refuse to accept mortality, the passing of time, and our own deaths. The refusal results in a far drastic and costly kind of death and ends in spiritual narcissism, while embracing one’s frailty as a created human being fosters hope in the eternal and spiritual magnanimity.

While there is much to be enjoyed and ruminated in the book, the lengthy dialogue of Will’s father, Charles Halloway, in the middle of the novel, will be the central focus. The book’s ending is also very noteworthy for our purposes. Mr. Halloway’s character initially struck me as unassuming, and if anything, I supposed he would be one to passively submit to the evils infiltrating the township. He is quiet, holds an ordinary job as a janitor at the local library, and appears to be vaguely dissatisfied with his age, marriage, and life situation. He has floated around the United States, spending most of his time reading books in libraries away from society, until finally meeting Will’s mother and settling down in one spot at the age of thirty-nine. Now, at fifty-four, he takes Will and Jim into the library and assists them in their fight against the “Illustrated Man,” the circus master on the hunt for hungry souls—including the souls of the two boys. “He paused and looked at the two boys and their fine young faces. ‘Yes. Very late in the game. To help you’” (p. 143).

Here begins Charles’s lengthy speech on the nature of the ghostly parade, the circus, the people enslaved in its performances, and what precisely fuels its progression. He goes from being the man who says nothing to the man who explains almost everything about what matters the most, surprising himself in the process. The boys listen, transfixed. He’s not only helping them. He’s “saving” them with his words.

In musing on the sinister carnival, Charles says this:

So the carnival feels ulcerated egos miles off and lopes to toast its hand at that ache. It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter’s night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail…So maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do each other, and the ferment of our most terrible regrets (p. 150).

We read here of the carnival’s dark method of tempting the restless heart. Jim and Will are both implicated in his warning; the carnival feeds off “boys ulcerating to be men” just as much it lives off of older souls like Charles to wish they were young again. Charles’s thoughts here connect nicely with the views of Reinhold Niebuhr as recounted by Terry Cooper in Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance2, a book that seeks to reconcile the Augustinian notion of pride with the more optimistic humanism of psychologist Carl Rogers and the positive psychology movement. Cooper writes,

A key Niebuhrian point emphasizes that the source of sin is not in what we do but in what we wish to be. Adam, symbolizing humanity, wanted to be more than human, to move beyond the confines of human creatureliness. He was not just presented with the possibility of disobedience. Instead, it was the serpent’s analysis of the situation that tempted him. This analysis offered Adam two important things: (a) a very attraction image of becoming Godlike, which further explained his current limitations, and (b) a promise to end the current tension between finitude and freedom. The serpent suggested that it was within Adam’s power to transcend human finitude (p. 44).

Like the serpent in the garden of Eden, the circus offers human beings a way out of finitude. It offers salvation from human vulnerability, taking full advantage of the tensions inherent in being both physical and spiritual. Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes something similar in his book on the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien: “Abolishing death by artificial immortality would make us all into rotten eggs. We are designed to hatch. And if our culture’s new summum bonum, the “conquest of nature”, is pushed to his apotheosis of the conquest of death, we will see stunning parallels between Sauron and ourselves.”3 As noted earlier in the essay, evading death, or denying one’s mortality, only means opting for a worse kind of death. The serpent in Genesis 3 tries to convince Adam and Eve that providing for themselves will secure immortality instead of death. This is every woman and man’s story—or so Niebuhr claims. We hurry, scramble, and exhaust ourselves in search of “happiness solutions” that simply never satisfy our inner longings. We run from death only to become “rotten eggs,” living artificial lives that lack risk, sacrifice, and genuine relationship. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung puts it this way, “The vices exercise such attractive power because they parody happiness so well. The goods they promise look so much like human perfection to us.”4 Charles Halloway speaks of this later in his discourse when Jim asks him if the carnival is Death itself and receives a surprising answer.

‘The carnival?’ The old man lit his pipe, blew smoke, seriously studied the patterns. ‘No. But I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something’ (p. 151).

These are radical statements, but they carry profound truth in them. What is death, exactly, and why do we tend to be so afraid of it? Apparently, it is the fear of “Nothing.” In any case, our fear of death predisposes us to anxiety and to be especially susceptible to the seducing temptations on display at the carnival, namely, immortality. But is this longing for immortality particularly wicked? What’s so wrong about trying to evade the great Nothing? According to the book, escaping Time and mortality comes at a great cost, and most importantly, does nothing to change human character. Charles goes on to say, “‘Changing size (age) doesn’t change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts, and it’d show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty….” Getting on a magic merry go round to achieve perpetual youth means denying reality. It means closing oneself off to relationships with peers of the same age. It means a death of everything meaningful. It means a rejection of love. Niebuhr puts it succinctly: “Without freedom from anxiety man is so enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity, so concerned, about himself, that he cannot release himself for the adventure of love” (p. 43). When we mishandle our anxiety, refusing to acknowledge our limits as finite beings, we get lost in an exhausting race for self-realization.

The alternative to this anxiety driven striving for self-made glory is to accept finitude and death, and thereby rise to a new and better kind of life. Cooper, incorporating Niebuhr with the writings of psychologist Karen Horney, discusses how accepting ourselves as we are, the good, bad, and the ugly, deals a death blow to our “idealized image,” and thus, to sin. He writes, “The idealized self is an image of what we should be, must be or ought to be, in order to be acceptable. The idealized self-image is born out of the imagination and is quite impossible to actualize It is a romanticized portrait built on exaggerated self-expectations” (p. 130). Consider the allure of the carnival in Bradbury’s novel that offers a way out of death. Consider the way the carousel, when reversed, makes people young and beautiful again. The parade offers the ideal, but ends up distorting reality, offering everything but supplying nothing but misery. And how does one dismantle the idealized self? By accepting one’s finitude, as Niebuhr commends us. Cooper goes on to write, “Our refusal to accept our finitude provokes in us a restless attempt to attain a Godlike status” (p. 140).

Accepting our finitude, which could be equated with “dying to self,” is the way of Christ, who told his disciples, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth much fruit” (John 12:24). Bradbury, I think, offers us a fictionalized portrait of this trope of “death and resurrection” at the end of the novel. He shows us what is looks like to deny the idealized self and choose the real world, despite its problems. Charles Halloway encounters a boy in a field at the end of the book and soon finds out that it is the “Illustrated Man,” only made young again by riding the carnival carousel in reverse. The illustrations covering the boy’s body represent all the souls he has amassed in his worldwide travels. Instead of running away from this seemingly innocent form of evil, however, Halloway embraces the child. He is not afraid of that which bears no substance, and experiences an earth shattering realization: “Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve” (p. 204). Earlier in the novel, Charles says something similar regarding death to Will: “‘Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn’t death, all the other things wouldn’t get tainted” (p. 100). As Charles embraces the Illustrated Man, confronting evil and death head on, he finds that the villain dissolves without a sound “like a Japanese lantern dropped in the dust.” There is no big fight, no explosion, and hardly any remains of the once intimidating figure. The Illustrated Man, we realize, gained his power by tricking people into being so afraid of mortality that they were willing to give him their very souls. To put it in biblical terms, the freaks of the dark carnival saved their “lives” but forfeited their true selves in the process. Charles Halloway sees through the trick, realizes that it is all a lie, and saves both Jim and Will from succumbing to the same tragic fate. The writer of Hebrews, then, was insightful then when he or she wrote, “He Himself likewise partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is the devil; and might deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb. 2:14-15, NASB). The fear of death condemns us to a life of preoccupation with an idealized self that we can never truly attain. Surrender to love offers a life of freedom in which we can live as real selves in the real world, and therefore exist in genuine community as Niebuhr noted.

It is beautiful the way fiction can enact instances of what J.R.R. Tolkien called “Eucatastrophe.” When everything seems drenched in wickedness, when the characters in the story seem to have to way out, we find that something better and more glorious than a shimmering carnival exists at the center of the universe. We find a goodness we can trust. Thus, we can reject the false allures of the world, accept our finitude, and find that life has meaning in such a space. Good fiction reminds us.

1 Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bantam Books. 1962.

2 Cooper, Terry. Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology & Psychology. IVP Academic, Downers Grove, IL.

3 Kreeft, Peter. The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings. Ignatius Press, San Francisco. P. 95.

4 DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI. 2nd Edition. 2020.