In Ray
Bradbury’s “The Martian” we meet an elderly couple that’s moved to Mars “to
enjoy [their] old age in peace” and to “forget [their deceased son Tom] and everything
on Earth” (Bradbury 182). However, this objective soon becomes difficult to
accomplish, as the couple comes across a Martian who takes on the appearance of
Tom and assumes his role in the family. As we saw in “The Third Expedition,”
people on Mars find it incredibly difficult to separate themselves from their
existence on Earth. And yet again, this doesn't end well.
LaFarge and his wife effectively recreate their life on Earth using the
Martian. Although LaFarge initially questions the Martian, he eventually
accepts it and even appreciates its presence. The Martian dines with the family
and joins them on a trip to town, effectively filling the void in their lives
left by the loss of their son. However, it later becomes evident that the
Martian has the same effect on all those it comes across: one family views him
as Lavinia, their late daughter, and he’s seen as a criminal by another. When he
becomes surrounded by nearly every townsmen, he eventually melts into a pile of
wax with several body parts mimicking those of the people he was modeling.
It’s the people’s inabilities to distance themselves from their pasts and
from life on Earth that leads to the death of the Martian. Overwhelmed by the
amount of people surrounding him and the necessity to appear as a significant
dead person to each, the Martian literally suffers a meltdown. And although the
parallel is not as obvious as it was in “The Moon Be Still as Bright,” there is
a comparison to be drawn between this occurrence and some instances in history.
Our inability to move away from our own way of life ultimately proves destructive
for whoever we come across. We project our own values on people of different
cultures despite an obvious incompatibility, and grow frustrated when it doesn't
succeed. A policy of assimilation or annihilation had often been the course of
action during the days of colonization; however, assimilation was too difficult
for many as deeply ingrained cultural traditions and different customs often prevented
a simple transition. This more than often led to miserable lives for the
indigenous people or their complete destruction. The Martian’s utter collapse
at the end of the short story could serve as a prominent example of the
difficulty one could have conforming to the societal expectations of a
different people. So I think it's important to ask ourselves: does our desire for familiarity override our capacity for openness to the unknown? Could we somehow manage to integrate ourselves to something new while preserving both our own identity and that of novel?
Although the assertion of power is slightly related to fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, I think it has more to do with the human desire to better one’s own state. For example, slavery in the United States was a very large institution that provided much wealth for the southern economy and white southerners. Did these white southerners actually fear their African American slaves or did they just like the result of owning slaves? I think some feared their slaves; but I think this fear stemmed from the knowledge that it was morally wrong to own a person. Why then would they continue to live in fear and practice something immoral? Because it benefited them. This desire to do whatever possible to better the situation and status of oneself has been a big problem throughout history and continues to plague our modern world. Acts of aggression can almost always be linked to wanting more for oneself, one’s family, or one’s country. One solution to this issue is to be open to others and accept the unknown because perhaps the more vantage points we have, it becomes more likely we will be less one-dimensionally centered. This may allow us to preserve what we know and who we are while being able to accept others.
ReplyDeleteReading the story of the Mars inhabitant Hathaway in "The Long Years", I was reminded of a similar story told fifty years later: the 2000 film Castaway, which tells the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a FedEx employee who is stranded on a remote Pacific island after a plane crash. While on entirely different planets, both Hathaway and Noland share an experience of extreme isolation, and as a result have created something to cope with it. In Noland's case, it was Wilson, a volleyball with a face that he talks to; Hathaway, on the other hand, took it a step further, recreating his whole family out of androids and wiring up an abandoned Martian colony with speakers and lights so that it seemed, at least from a distance, inhabited. These men's responses to loneliness are representative of the human need for social interaction. With the exception of orangutans, all apes, including humans, are social species, living with other members of their species in groups. As a result, humans have a biological need for interaction, at least in some capacity, with other humans; if this need is not fulfilled for prolonged periods, the person can suffer from mental deterioration. To fulfill this urge, and thus protect their sanity, both men create substitutes until they are able to interact with real humans once again.
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