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Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark’s carousel symbolizes temptation within Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The carousel is one of the attractions of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and while the carnival itself represents evil within Bradbury’s novel, the carousel is the means through which Mr. Dark lures and captures the souls that fuel his wicked carnival. The carousel is infused with the supernatural, and it has the power to instantly transform a rider’s age in keeping with how many turns it makes either forward or backward. For instance, Mr. Cooger steps on the merry-go-round a forty-year-old man, and after twenty-eight turns backward, he steps off a twelve-year-old boy. The carousel also has a magical calliope that plays on its own volition, and when the carousel spins backward, it plays Chopin’s “Funeral March” in reverse to symbolize, as Will Halloway puts it, the rider’s march “away from the grave.” Several characters struggle with their desire to ride the carousel, and while Will and Jim want to ride to instantly become men and escape the confines of childhood, both Charles and Miss Foley, who are in their fifties, long to recapture their lost youth. The carousel, and to a greater extent the entire carnival, relies on carnival goers choosing to ride, and it is in this way that Bradbury ultimately asserts that good and evil are a matter of choice rather than an inherent quality. Will, Jim, and Charles fight their desire to ride the carousel for much of the novel, and this implies that the choice between good and evil is a constant battle fraught with temptation that must be continually negotiated.
The Carousel Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Something Wicked This Way Comes quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Carousel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 22
Quotes
Will grabbed Jim’s shirt front, felt his heart bang under the chest bones. “Jim—”
“Let go.” Jim was terribly quiet. “If he knows you’re here, he won’t come out. Willy, if you don’t let go, I’ll remember when—”
“When what!”
“When I’m older, darn it, older!”
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Chapter 23
Quotes
Will saw the evil boy, a year older still, glide around into the night. Five or six more times around and he’d be bigger than the two of them!
“Jim, he’ll kill us!”
“Not me, no!”
Will felt a sting of electricity. He yelled, pulled back, hit the switch handle. The control box spat. Lightning jumped to the sky, Jim and Will, flung by the blast, lay watching the merry-go-round run wild.
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Chapter 40
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“Why, that if you’re a miserable sinner in one shape, you’re a miserable sinner in another. Changing size doesn’t change the brain. If I made you twenty-five tomorrow, Jim, your thoughts would still be boy thoughts and it’d show! Or if they turned me into a boy of ten this instant, my brain would still be fifty and that boy would act funnier and older and weirder than any boy ever. Then, too, time’s out of joint another way.”
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“So, what happens? You get your reward: madness. Change of body, change of personal environment, for one thing. Guilt, for another, guilt at leaving your wife, husband, friends to die the way all men die—Lord, that alone would give a man fits. So more fear, more agony for the carnival to breakfast on. So with the green vapors coming off your stricken conscience you say you want to go back the way you were! The carnival nods and listens. Yes, they promise, if you behave as they say, in a short while they’ll give you back your twoscore and ten or whatever. On the promise alone of being returned to normal old age, that train travels with the world, its side show populated with madmen waiting to be released from bondage, meantime servicing the carnival, giving it coke for its ovens.”
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Chapter 54
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“Dad, will they ever come back?”
“No. And yes.” Dad tucked away his harmonica. “No, not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they’ll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at latest, sunset tomorrow they’ll show. They’re on the road.”
“Oh, no,” said Will.
“Oh, yes,” said Dad. “We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight’s just begun.”
They moved around the carousel slowly.
“What will they look like? How will we know them?”
“Why,” said Dad, quietly, “maybe they’re already here.”
Both boys looked around swiftly.
But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.
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Get the entire Something Wicked This Way Comes LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Carousel Symbol Timeline in Something Wicked This Way Comes
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Carousel appears in Something Wicked This Way Comes. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 13
...home, and in the distance, he can see the carnival “waiting.” Charles can see a carousel with “night beasts hanging midgallop” and a Mirror Maze. “Three o’clock…” Charles says out loud...
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Chapter 18
...go home for dinner and the carnival midway looks deserted. Jim and Will pass the carousel and notice a large sign reading: “OUT OF ORDER! KEEP OFF!” Jim doesn’t believe it....
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...over,” Mr. Dark says. He tells Jim to come back after supper and ride the carousel when it is fixed. “Take this card,” Mr. Dark says. “Free ride.”
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Jim and Will run from the carousel and quickly climb a tree, secretly watching Dark and Cooger mill about the ride. Mr....
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Chapter 22
Will imagines Jim on the carousel, moving forward until he is a man of twenty, and then Will hauls off and...
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Chapter 23
...rides.” As Robert runs toward the carnival, he disappears behind a tent and the old carousel jerks into action, this time in forward motion. Jim stops and stares at the ride.
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Will watches as Jim readies himself to jump on the carousel. “Jim!” cries Will. “No!” Will runs and tackles him. The boys struggle to their feet...
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Bolts of electricity fly from the control box of the carousel and Jim and Will watch as Robert continues to zip by, aging with each turn....
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Chapter 24
...be alive,” Jim says. “We didn’t mean to do it!” When they arrive at the carousel, Mr. Cooger is nowhere to be found. “He was here, we swear!” cries Jim. He...
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Chapter 25
...feeling the that “he didn’t belong, his proof was not proof.” She looks to the carousel ticket in the living room. “ADMIT ONE,” it reads. Despite her doubts about Robert, she...
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Chapter 26
...on everybody’s favorite ride?” Will tells Jim that he knows Jim plans to ride the carousel and “ditch” him. Jim tenderly touches Will’s arm and reassures him that he won’t leave...
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Will continues to plead with Jim to stay away from the carousel. “Everything in its time,” Will continues, “like the preacher said only last month, everything one...
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Chapter 32
The next morning, while rain drenches Green Town and the carnival grounds, the carousel “suddenly spasms to life.” Hearing the calliope music, Miss Foley “hurries” out her front door...
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Chapter 40
...we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something,” so the carnival offers the carousel. But, Charles says, if you are “miserable” at one age, you will be “miserable” at...
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Chapter 42
...mother tonight?” Dark asks. He says that Will’s mother has taken a ride on the carousel and is now two hundred years old. He continues searching and calling out to the...
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Chapter 51
...can’t tell if it is playing forward or backward. Running in the direction of the carousel Will stops. “Mr. Electrico!” he thinks. “Kill or cure!” Will looks to the surrounding tents...
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A group of freaks appear carrying Mr. Electrico in the electric chair toward the carousel. Suddenly, the freaks “jump and scurry,” and drop the chair. Charles sneezes as a strong...
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Jim appears between the fallen chair and the carousel. “Jim!” yells Will. Mr. Dark is nowhere to be found, but Will knows that he...
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Jim reaches out for the brass poles of the moving carousel. He slaps his hand from pole to pole as the ride picks up speed, and...
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...and Jim “ride the night.” After “traveling half a year,” Will rips Jim from the carousel, and both boys fall to the ground just as Charles shuts down the ride and...
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Chapter 54
...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...
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