84 pages • 2 hours read
Ray BradburyThe Illustrated Man
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Story 15
Story 15 Summary: “The City”
An empty city on a remote planet waits 20 thousand years for an unknown event. A rocket finally lands, and men emerge. Unbeknownst to them, their presence activates the city. It opens “secret nostrils” in its walls, evaluating them. Chemical details scroll on a typewriter and are logged, down to the smell of butter, which “the great Nose broke down into memories of milk, cheese, ice cream, butter, the effluvium of a dairy economy” (223).
At the men’s military chatter, Ears wake up too. After years of listening only to nature, they log the sound of human voices. One man, Smith, is extremely uncomfortable; he feels the city is too familiar. His fears are shot down by his captain, who reminds Smith that theirs is the only light-year rocket in existence. The Ears hear the conversation, and the city wafts the welcoming smell of green grass to the men to calm them: “the countermove had succeeded. The pawns were proceeding forward” (224-25).
The Eyes of the city open in the windows. Smith claims he saw it, but no one believes him. The streets are like tongues, tasting their rubberoid boots. Fully awake, the city continues taking minute measurements of the men and their physiology.
Smith suddenly bolts, overwhelmed by fear, and in the chaos, a trap is opened in the street. The captain falls in, unnoticed by the other men, and is instantly eviscerated and evaluated. Machines take apart his body “like a quick and curious player of chess, using the red paws and the red pieces” (227). The city confirms that these are human beings from Earth, which attacked the local Taollan people 20 thousand years before, made them slaves, and destroyed them with disease. The Earthmen fled and forgot—but the city did not.
The city reassembles the captain with artificial parts inside. Indistinguishable from his old self, he reappears on the street and shoots Smith dead, then tells the shocked crew that he is the city now. The Taollans built the city to take vengeance on mankind, whenever they returned: “the name of this city was and is Revenge, upon the planet of Darkness” (229). The street opens, and all the men are similarly gutted and reassembled. They load up biological weapons on their rocket to take back with them to Earth. Its task complete, the city shuts down: “slowly, pleasurably, [it] enjoyed the luxury of dying” (231).
Story 15 Analysis
Like “The Other Foot,” “The City” centers on revenge. However, these rocket men do not encounter fellow humans on Mars, who are capable of empathy and forgiveness. Instead, they are at the mercy of a machine programmed for vengeance. In “The Other Foot,” the 20 years that had passed were enough for the Martians to accept that their oppressors had been wiped out or punished. In “The City,” 20 thousand years have passed, but still the city holds on to its grudge, far after those responsible are gone. Though it is humanized through Bradbury’s descriptions of its sense “organs,” it is also unsettlingly black and white in its assessment of men.
Bradbury foreshadows the city not being as remote and alien as it seems by having the Nostrils identify “a full dairy economy” early on—a detail that indicates that the city is somehow familiar with life on Earth. Smith, too, senses something “familiar” about the city, and is unsettled. In horror media, a sense of the eerie is often tripped by the absence of something that is expected, and this empty city exists in a clear perversion of its intended function. Its lack of people, its “untrod streets and its untouched doorknobs,” are unnatural. The primary function of a city is to be lived in, but this one has sat uninhabited for millennia and instead of providing life and sanctuary, it provides death. In this way, it recalls the Happy-life home of “The Veldt,” another dwelling place made deadly by technology.
Usually, Bradbury is clear about the ramifications of negative emotions like vengeance. Here, he is less heavy-handed about who is the hero, or, at least, the character with whom readers can most easily sympathize. Is the city’s death at the end of the story peaceful? Or is it as unfulfilling and bitter as Hitchcock’s suicide in “No Particular Night”?
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By Ray Bradbury
