However, a number of Bradbury’s stories go a step further, using sun imagery as a symbol for God and the promise of immortality. Similarly, Bradbury’s fire imagery focuses on the theme of the victory of good over evil. Appropriately, Bradbury’s fire imagery and his sun imagery function hand-in-hand, because one can symbolically consider fire as the sun’s earthly representative. The works that deal most specifically with fire imagery contain Bradbury’s most important social commentaries concerning the condition of the world as he sees it. His most intense pleas in favor of the arts and humanities, as opposed to sterile technology, occur in stories that use sun and fire imagery.
Another image that Bradbury often uses to show the possibilities for overcoming evil in the world is the smile. Smiles and laughter, according to Bradbury, derive their power from their forefather—love. Bradbury believes that love is the strongest and most humanizing force that man possesses.
Our knowledge of death as a part of life, our learning to make the best of who and what we are, our acceptance of evil as well as good in the world, and our battle to arrest evil are the discoveries that give us a broader insight into ourselves.
Bradbury also presents this self-knowledge in his stories through the use of water imagery. Bradbury uses water imagery in the traditional sense—that is, to suggest the life source itself and the transition of the life cycle from one phase to another. Water imagery also depicts the theme of rebirth, regeneration, and purification, which Bradbury also uses throughout his writings. He incorporates the rebirth image into his “celebrate life” theme. Bradbury urges us to enjoy being alive in spite of life’s difficulties, rather than finding life drudgery because of its difficulties.
Bradbury has high hopes for the future of man and man’s acquisition of the most fulfilling life possible (a utopia). He shows his readers a utopian world that can result if they heed his advice, and he describes the horrors that can ensue if certain contemporary tendencies (for example, greed, dependence upon technology, governmental control) aren’t stopped. Bradbury always suggests that Earth can be the best possible of all worlds, and he also suggests that humankind, when it has come to grips with itself, can make the world a place in which we can all be as free and as happy as we have ever dreamed.
