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
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!”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
The Carousel Symbol Timeline in Something Wicked This Way Comes
