There are several refences to clocks within Something Wicked This Way Comes, and while they are certainly associated with keeping time, Bradbury also uses clocks to symbolize life and mortality. When Charles Halloway describes his wife, Mrs. Halloway, he calls her a “strange wonderful clock” who “nests in Time.” Because Charles’s wife has given birth to their son, Will, she has made the “flesh that holds fast and binds eternity,” and as such, she is immortal. On the other hand, after the evil Mr. Dark dispatches the Dust Witch to kill Charles by inducing a fatal heart attack, Mr. Dark tells her to “stop his clock.” Whereas Charles’s wife’s clock ensures her immortality, Charles’s own clock is the source of his own vulnerability and mortality.
Additionally, ticking clocks are also symbolic of the choice between good and evil in Bradbury’s novel. Charles explains to Will and Jim that each passing second is another opportunity to deny evil and embrace good. “That’s what the clock ticks,” Charles says, “that’s what it says in the ticks.” Indeed, Bradbury frequently mentions ticking clocks at key times during in the novel. For example, as Will sneaks out late at night to follow Jim to Miss Foley’s house to engage Mr. Cooger (who is posing as Miss Foley’s twelve-year-old nephew, Robert), Jim faintly hears the town clock strike ten. Similarly, at the end of the novel, when Will, Jim, and Charles must resist the evil carousel one last time, the same clock can be heard striking midnight. Just as Charles explains, each individual strike of the clock represents another chance to reject the evil of Cooger and Dark’s carnival and instead choose good. Lastly, when Charles researches the carnival and tries to find a way to defeat its evil, he arranges the books he references in the shape of a clockface. Like the individual ticks of the clock, each book represents Charles’s own attempts to denounce evil and commit himself—and by extension, Will and Jim as well—to good.
Clocks Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
His wife smiled in her sleep.
Why?
She’s immortal. She has a son.
Your son, too!
But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who they know will live forever.
“Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it’s hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you lie awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minutes, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that’s what the clock ticks, that’s what it says in the ticks.”
“Is…is it…Death?”
“The carnival?” The old man lit his pipe, blew smoke, seriously studied the patterns. “No. But I think it uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But…Nothing? Where do you hit it? Has it a heart, soul, butt-behind, brain? No, no. So the carnival just shakes a great croupier’s cupful of Nothing at us, and reaps us as we tumble back head-over-heels in fright.”
“Maybe this isn’t necessary,” said Charles Halloway. “Maybe it wouldn’t run anyway, without the freaks to give it power. But—” He hit the box a last time and threw down the wrench.
“It’s late. Must be midnight straight up.”
Obediently, the City Hall clock, the Baptist church clock, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Catholic church, all the clocks, struck twelve. The wind was seeded with Time.
Clocks Symbol Timeline in Something Wicked This Way Comes
