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Chapter 38
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Something Wicked This Way Comes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good vs. Evil
Age, Time, and Acceptance
Love and Happiness
Fear, the Supernatural, and the Unknown
Summary
Analysis
“Oh gosh,” cries Will. “It’s hopeless!” Charles disagrees. “The very fact that we’re here worrying about the difference between summer and autumn, makes me sure there’s a way out,” he says. Charles explains to the boys that they “don’t have to be evil.” Mr. Dark doesn’t “hold all the cards,” he says. Mr. Dark is afraid too, Charles can sense it.
Charles continues. “We can’t be good unless we know what bad is, and it’s a shame we’re working against time,” he says. Jim asks Charles where the carnival came from. Charles tells him it probably started as one man, long ago, and he slowly collected all the others. “The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread,” he says. “They butter it with pain.” They exist only to hurt people, and that hurt “fuels” the carnival. The boys ask the older man how he knows all this. “My skeleton knows,” Charles says. “It tells me. I tell you.”
Here, the carnival is described in terms of pure evil. Charles knows all this because of his life experience, which Jim and Will won’t have if they ride the carousel and instantly become older. In this way, Bradbury argues the importance of the slow, cumulative nature of aging and experience.
Themes
