Monsters Are Due On Maple St Analysis

In Monsters are Due on Maple St. there were many themes. The two themes I picked that I think are the most valid are “Suspicion can destroy” and “a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout of its own.” Both of these themes are very good explanations of the story.
The first theme “suspicion can destroy” has many examples that support it. When the spaceship flies over the sky and there is a loud noise with a flash of light everybody becomes suspicious of what is going on. Soon people on Maple St. realize that the power is out and nothing is working. A woman tries to call on the telephone and she can’t get through to an operator. Steve tries to start his car and it won’t start. Soon a Mob forms and everybody gets really suspicious of who created all of this chaos. Later at night the people on Maple St get suspicious of one person and then they start finding every idiosyncrasies that they have. Charlie starts blaming Les Goodman for looking at the stars at night, his car starting, and the lights in his house turning on. Then the rest of the neighborhood keeps an eye on Les and makes sure he doesn’t do anything bad. Pete came back and no one knew who it was him
was trying to find someone to put the blame on and it just destroyed them and made a mess. Here are some examples in the story that prove this theme valid. Charlie was blaming Les for what happened because Les’s car was the only one that started and his lights were the only lights on the street that worked. People blamed Tommy for coming up with the idea about the aliens. Then at the very end of the story everybody blamed Charlie because he shot Pete and Charlie blamed everyone else so quickly for all of their actions. Maple St. became very chaotic because people were trying to find scapegoats and not work together to figure out the