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11 Fleeing from the “Ghost Machines”: Patterns of Resistance in The Pedestrian and The Murderer Markus Arno Carpenter Everything went on in the tomb-like houses at night now…. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where people sat like the dead, with the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.” The Pedestrian “Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night….” The Murderer Of the stories quoted above, The Pedestrian, first published in 1951, is much better known. Considered one of Ray Bradbury’s finest short stories from the Cold War period, it also retains special interest as an important precursor text of the author’s first, and highly acclaimed, novel-length work, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). In view of its publishing history, we may assume that The Murderer was written just shortly after The Pedestrian. The stories have much in common, channeling some of the same currents of frustration and anger behind the dystopian visions elaborated in the subsequent novel. Both stories are science fiction, extrapolating the social effects of common technologies well into a future which they come to dominate. While The Pedestrian seems the bleaker of the two, they each present a time when electronic devices meant to enrich and facilitate our well-being completely stifle thought and imagination, rob us of our peace of mind, and practically destroy meaningful human connections. These satirical, perhaps cautionary tales imply that without free exercise of thought and imagination, the human subject ultimately ceases to be a subject, thus losing the capacity of subject-to-subject relations. Instead of an enhanced self, there emerges an electronically attenuated self, hardly capable of knowing itself or others. These themes would be developed by postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco about a quarter of a century after these stories were published. The Pedestrian and The Murderer bear other similarities, including their respective protagonists, who incarnate variants of a politics of resistance. Leonard Mead is something of a dreamer whose resistance, while determined, ARTICLE The New Ray Bradbury Review 12 remains passive and in the short story at least, futile. On the other hand, Brock, from The Murderer, is something of a bomb-thrower. He is more active, aggressively challenging the status quo of his society, perhaps echoing the author’s personal frustrations with the cultural politics of the time. Bradbury’s (non-fictional) sociopolitical comments in “Letter to the Republican Party,” printed, at the writer’s expense, in the Hollywood trade magazine DailyVariety in November of 1952, is a verbal blast from someone clearly fed up with the way things had become and unafraid of the consequences of dissent. In tone, it approximates some of Brock’s thrust in The Murderer when it implies that concerning important issues, “the minority” may ultimately be correct in contrast to a less thoughtful, drowsy majority. It should be noted that the protagonists from both stories share an appreciation for the power and beauty of the printed word. Leonard Mead of The Pedestrian is a frustrated writer (no one cares to read in his world) and Brock, in the context of his argumentative encounter with the status quo personified by a state psychologist, confesses that he always “dreamed of being one.” Finally, according to the author, both stories were inspired by separate but highly annoying personal incidents, so naturally the main characters of these stories may be viewed as author surrogates . This is typical of Bradbury’s work as he has variously stated that most of his protagonists are merely thinly masked versions of himself, but these stories are especially interesting when viewed in terms of their evolution through other media by the hand of their author. The Pedestrian was transformed into a stage play in 1966, and along with The Murderer, was finally produced as a teleplay for The Ray Bradbury Theater. Appearing together in The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), both stories critiqued the relatively new medium of television. Central to The Pedestrian, this critique became even sharper in the RBT version of the story (partially through incorporating a passage from The Murderer) and more prominent in the teleplay of The Murderer. When these stories were written, TV was entering homes at an exponential rate, becoming, as it were, a part of the furniture. As an entertainment and information medium, it was the death knell for radio1 and a gnawing concern for...

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