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Chapter 53
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
“He’s dead!” Will screams and starts to cry. “Stop that!” Charles yells as he slaps Will’s face. “Mr. Dark and his sort, they like crying, my God they love tears! Jesus God, the more you bawl, the more they drink the salt off your chin,” he says. He orders Will to laugh. “I can’t,” Will says. You must, Charles says. “We can’t take them seriously, Will!”
Charles drags Will to his feet and rifles through his pockets. He finds a harmonica and blows it. “Sing!” he yells to Will. “What?” Will asks, confused. Charles tells Will that they must be “silly.” He continues. “I’ll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags. Don’t feed them one damn thing, Willy,” he says. “Loosen your bones!” Will refuses. “Nothing…funny…” he says. “Death’s funny, God damn it!” Charles screams, pulling Will up to dance. Suddenly, the silliness of it all strikes Will, and he begins to laugh and dance with his father.
Will begins to laugh and dance with Charles, representing his own acceptance of the realities of life and death. Charles claims earlier in the text that the carnival uses the fear of death to capture souls, and Charles refuses to give the carnival power over him when he denies his own fear. He isn’t forcefully trying to repress his emotions, but instead taking a different point of view that will rob the carnival of its strength. He is still allowed “sadness,” but he wants that sadness to be for himself, not fuel for an evil power.
Themes
As Will and Charles dance around Jim’s body, he begins to stir. They keep dancing and Jim begins to smile. He slowly reaches up to them, and without speaking, they pull him to his feet and he “comes down dancing.” The three of them dance and laugh, and finally, Jim speaks. “What happened?” he asks. “What didn’t!” Charles answers.
Again, Jim’s recovery is evidence of the power of happiness and laughter. He cannot be saved by simply reviving his heart or lungs; rather, it is his soul that needs to be revived.
Themes
“Dad,” Will asks, “will they ever come back.” Charles looks to the abandoned carnival. “No,” he answers. “And yes.” Charles says the carnival won’t be coming back, but “other people like them” will. “God knows what shape they’ll come in next,” he says, but they are already on their way. “What will they look like?” Will asks. “How will we know them?” Charles is quiet. “Why, maybe they’re already here,” he says. Will and Jim look around at the empty field.
Will and Jim look around to an empty field because they have the capacity for evil. This reflects Bradbury’s central argument that everyone, even a seemingly pure soul like Will, can reject good and embrace evil at any moment. The danger of evil is not gone simply because the carnival is destroyed—the potential for harm is present in each living soul.
Themes
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Charles, Will, and Jim turn to leave, and as they do, they walk by the still and silent carousel. “Just three times around,” thinks Will. “Just four times around,” thinks Jim. “Just ten times around, back,” thinks Charles. It would be so simple, but Charles knows better. “Once you start,” thinks Charles, “you’d always come back. One more ride and more ride. And, after awhile, you’d offer rides to friends.” Soon, “you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks.” It probably won’t run without the freaks, Charles tells the boys, but he takes a wrench and breaks the control box of the carousel anyway as all the clocks in town “obediently” strike midnight.
As the town clocks strike midnight, it serves as another reminder that each second is another opportunity to choose between good and evil. Charles, Will, and Jim are still tempted to ride the carousel and become their desired age, but they now know that to do so is to embrace evil. When Charles breaks the control box, he rejects evil emphatically, but only for a moment of conviction. The clock will continue to tick and provide more opportunities to stray.
Themes
“Last one to the railroad semaphore at Green Crossing is an old lady!” Will and Jim yell as they run into the night. Charles “hesitates only for a moment.” He feels a familiar pain in his chest but decides to run anyway. Death isn’t important, he thinks; everything else is. Charles runs alongside the boys as they all laugh and “slap the semaphore signal base at the exact same instant.”
