Bookends by Michael Chabon
Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-22T16:00:00+00:00
“The Rocket Man,” Ray Bradbury
THE MOST IMPORTANT SHORT STORY IN MY LIFE AS A WRITER is Ray Bradbury’s “The Rocket Man.” I read it for the first time when I was ten. I was making my way, with pleasure, through a collection of Bradbury’s stories called R Is for Rocket. I had been an avid reader for about five years, and at first the pleasure I felt was the familiar pleasure I derived from the flights of an author’s fancy, and from the anticipation and surprise of plot. Then I came to “The Rocket Man.” It’s the narrative of the young son of a rocket pilot whose father is to him at once an ordinary, ordinarily absent father, puttering around the house on his days off, and a terrible, mysterious demigod whose kingdom is the stars. The danger of the father’s profession, the imminence and immanence of death, lie upon the family like the dust of stars that the narrator lovingly collects from his father’s flight suit every time the Rocket Man comes home. During one of the father’s leaves, the family travels to Mexico by car. One evening they stop along a rural road to rest, and in the last light of the day the son notices bright butterflies, dozens of them, trapped and dying in the grille of the car.
I think it was when I got to the butterflies—in that brief, beautiful image comprising life, death, and technology—that the hair on the back of my neck began to stand on end. All at once, the pleasure I took in reading was altered irrevocably. Before now I had never noticed, somehow, that stories were made not of ideas or exciting twists of plot but of language. And not merely of pretty words and neat turns of phrase, but of systems of imagery, strategies of metaphor. “The Rocket Man” unfolds to its melancholy conclusion in a series of haunting images of light and darkness, of machinery and biology interlocked, of splendor and fragility. The sense of foreboding is powerful; the imagery becomes a kind of plot of its own, a shadow plot. The end, when it comes, is at once an awful surprise, and inevitable as any Rocket Man, or those who mourn him, could expect.
I have never since looked quite the same way at fathers, butterflies, science fiction, language, short stories, or the sun. (2002)
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