Hope In The Martian Chronicles

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Everyone has a hope, a dream, or a plan. The characters in The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, are no exception. The hopes, dreams, and plans these different characters have unite each of the short stories in this classic American novel. Everyone and everything no matter what age, gender, race, or species have a goal in life that they strive to achieve. There are examples of this reoccurring theme throughout the short stories in the book: a dream of happiness for a Martian in “Ylla,” a plan to terrorize in “Usher II,” and a hope of a fresh start in “The Million-Year Picnic.” In “Ylla,” a Martian man, Mr. K, has a dream of happiness. Mr. K wants his life to be as happy as it possibly can. When his wife, Mrs. K, starts having vivid dreams about the men on the first expedition coming to Mars, he gets very jealous: “… he almost screamed. ’You should have heard yourself, fawning on him, talking to him, singing with him, oh gods, all night; you should have heard yourself’” (Bradbury 9). The more she dreams about the earth man, the more …show more content…

“The Million-Year Picnic” is an excellent example of how people need hope in their life. The family in this story came to Mars to start their life over with another family, “’…We and a handful of others who’ll land in a few days. Enough to start over. Enough to turn away from all that back on Earth…’” (180). The families fled from Earth after the nuclear war destroyed it. The father of the first family, William Thomas, has a hope of a fresh start to the human race on Mars as Martians with the second family. He burns everything that had to do with Earth, including a world map: “’I’m burning way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now” (179). He did not want his family and future generations to make the same mistakes humans from Earth made. Without his hope, his family would have no reason to keep going, thus, no reason repopulate the human

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