The One Who Waits by Bradbury Essay

The text under analysis is a short story “The One Who Waits” by Ray Bradbury. “The one who waits” is a science fiction story. Like in many other Bradbury’s stories, the action takes place in future when it is possible to travel to other planets. The story describes one of the first landings on Mars . It is narrated in the 1st person by a mysterious creature, en entity who lives in a well on Mars. It has no body and itself doesn’t know who it is. The creature watches how a spaceship arrives from the Earth and the astronauts get outside. The creature has the ability to get inside a human being, to get control of his body and mind. So one by one it captures all the astronauts and kills them. The 1st one, Jones dies from unknown reason, the 2nd one, the captain shoots himself and all the rest are forced to throw themselves in the well. So, to be more exact, they are forced to commit suicide. The creature returns to its previous immaterial condition to wait for another rocket to come in and to take hold of its passengers. The story is framed by absolutely identical paragraphs which shows that the incident described wasn’t in fact anything significant or unusual. The first important thing is to understand who or what this creature is. It is at the same time a narrator and a protagonist. It says: “How can I tell you what I am when I don’t know? I cannot.” Then it says: “I am mist and moonlight and memory”. Alliteration emphasizes these 3 notions (mist, moonlight and memory) which are neither animate nor tangible. It has some human senses: it can see, hear and smell. The most important for it is hearing – all the sounds are described in detail. Probably it can produce sounds, too: “Sometimes I sing old songs”. But at the same time it has some extraordinary abilities: “I fall like rain into the well”, “I hang like a flower pollen”, “I turn in the sun like a wheel”, “My coolness rises to the objects”, “I rise in the warm air”, “I hover