Listening for Bradbury's Voice

“‘[…] Please!’ [Colonel Freeleigh] pleaded. ‘One last time, listen to me. They’re taking the phone out tomorrow. I can never call you again.’

Jorge said nothing.

The old man went on. ‘For the love of God, Jorge! For friendship, then, for the old days! You don’t know what it means. You’re my age but you can move! I haven’t moved anywhere in ten years.’

He dropped the phone and had trouble picking it up, his chest was so thick with paid. ‘Jorge! You are still there, aren’t you?’

‘This will be the last time?’ said Jorge.

‘I promise!’

` The phone was laid on a deck thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window.

‘Listen,’ whispered the old man to himself.

And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing “La Marimba”—oh, a lovely, dancing tune.

With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.

He wanted to say, ‘You’re still there, aren’t you? All of you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can’t believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And so it is good to hear the sounds and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living…’ […]

The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor. […]

There was something in his silence that made them all shut their mouths. […]

Douglass, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man’s now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.

Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.” (133-5)

This scene from Dandelion Wine, a Ray Bradbury novel made up of a series of vignettes from the summer of 1928 in Green Town, the archetypical small town, reveals quite a lot about Bradbury’s voice as an author. Through the reminisces of Colonel Freeleigh, Bradbury interjects the story with even more nostalgia. Besides just idealizing life in 1928, which coincides with Bradbury’s childhood, Bradbury idealizes the life that Colonel Freeleigh once had: life in a busy city such as Mexico City. In addition to being an example of nostalgia being used by the author, this passage also shows Bradbury’s view on death. Through Freeleigh’s content passing, marked by him enjoying the sounds and memories that were most joyful to him, the reader can infer that Bradbury believes one should not be afraid of death. Rather, he believes that one should live one’s live to the fullest extent and get everything out of it that one wants even up to the very moment that you die, in the act of doing what you love and what brings you happiness. This is instead of living one’s life in fear of death and avoiding doing the things that to oneself really matter.

Further analyzing the events that occur in this passage, one could theorize that Bradbury believes that children understand death in a way that no middle-aged adult does, due to how Doug and the other boys are not fazed at all with the discovery of dead Colonel Freeleigh, a respected elder. That they would so casually approach his body and pick up the phone clasped in his hands shows that Bradbury believes children understand Freeleigh’s joy in the face of death. This relates to the theme of nostalgia because throughout this novel Bradbury yearns to once again view the world from the eyes of a child, like he did in the summer of 1928 in the small town he grew up in. Bradbury, at the time of writing, is now middle-aged and in between being a child and an elderly person and, due to his age, has a fear of death and wishes that he could be able to view death in the way he used to as a child, but not is unable to do so. This vignette is an expression of that desire of Bradbury.