Protagonist Will Halloway and his best friend, Jim Nightshade, are both one week shy of their fourteenth birthdays, and while they may be on the cusp of manhood, they are not quite adults. Both enjoy typical children’s things, like books about dinosaurs and traveling carnivals, but Jim yearns for the freedom to live outside the restraints of childhood. When Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show comes to town with its mysterious carousel, it is the answer to Jim’s problems of juvenile angst. Mr. Cooger, the proprietor of the carnival, steps onto the carousel a middle-aged man, and after riding the magical contraption backward, steps off a twelve-year-old boy. If Jim rides the carousel in the opposite direction, he realizes, he can fast forward and instantly become a man. Conversely, Will’s father, Charles, is feeling his own fifty-four years, but these feelings are nothing a couple of turns backward on the carousel couldn’t cure. However, Jim and Charles quickly learn that riding the carousel comes at a considerable cost: doing so means that they will become part of Mr. Dark’s side show, and their new physical age will be at odds with their actual life experience. With the juxtaposition of old and young in Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the sinister carousel that stands between the two, Bradbury ultimately warns against rushing into adulthood or looking wistfully back upon childhood. Instead, Bradbury argues the value of embracing age and the slow, cumulative nature of experience.
Jim and Charles represent the desire to grow up and turn back the clock, respectively. When Jim and Will walk home from the library, Jim wants to linger near a house at the corner of Hickory and Main, where, over the summer, the boys witnessed a couple having sex. Will is embarrassed and doesn’t understand what the couple was doing exactly, but Jim longs to again catch them in the act. “Just one last time,” Jim begs Will. “You know it won’t be the last!” Will responds, suggesting that Jim frequently lingers near the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the forbidden adult act, which underscores Jim’s eagerness to grow up. Charles likewise resents his age, but unlike Jim, Charles wishes he could again be a young man. As Will eavesdrops on his parents’ conversation, he hears his father’s broken voice. “Will…makes me feel so old…a man should play baseball with his son…” Charles longs to be a bigger part of his young son’s life, but feels that his advance age prohibits this. Furthermore, it is not only Will’s age that makes Charles feel old. Will’s mother is also ten years younger than Charles. “And you. Who’s your daughter? people say,” Charles complains to her. Because Charles’s wife is so much younger, people assume that she must be his daughter. Each of these examples emphasize Charles and Jim’s desire to respectively rewind or fast-forward time.
While Cooger and Dark’s carousel can magically make Jim and Charles their desired ages, this instant gratification is not all it’s cracked up to be. As Mr. Cooger steps on the carousel to return to his true age, Will and Jim accidentally knock the controls of the ride and send Mr. Cooger flying forward many, many times. By the time the carousel strops, Mr. Cooger has aged over a hundred years and is a frail old man. He later turns to dust and blows away after the side show freaks drop him en route to the carousel. Furthermore, after Miss Foley, Jim and Will’s fifty-year-old teacher, rides the carousel, it is implied that she is transformed into a frightened little girl. Miss Foley is now young, but she can’t possibly go back to her life—no one would ever believe her outrageous story. By riding the carousel, Miss Foley sacrifices her autonomy and her ability to care for herself, despite her fifty years of wisdom and experience. Miss Foley now belongs to Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, and her future is uncertain. As Jim struggles with the temptation of riding the carousel, Charles warns him, “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.” Here, Bradbury argues the value of experience, which cannot be gained (or lost) simply by jumping on a magical carousel. These examples highlight the cost of admission for riding Cooger and Dark’s carousel, and Jim and Charles must be prepared to pay dearly for their desired age. In this way, Bradbury implies that neither Charles nor Jim will ever be happy until they accept the circumstances of their age.
For Charles to successfully make it out of the carnival, destroy Mr. Dark, and save Jim, he must first accept his age and the inevitable mortality that it implies. Bradbury writes, “All because [Charles] accepted everything at last, accepted the carnival, the hills beyond, the people in the hills, Jim, Will, and above all himself and all of life,” he is finally able to live happily, free from the resentment of his age. Jim must likewise find acceptance in the fact that he can’t rush into adulthood, and this acceptance is implied as Will, Jim, and Charles run side-by-side away from the carnival grounds laughing happily at the end of the novel. Ultimately, Something Wicked This Way Comes warns against the dangers of wishing away time or excessively mourning its loss, and Charles and Jim are not truly happy until they accept this reality.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Age, Time, and Acceptance ThemeTracker
Age, Time, and Acceptance Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
And that was the October week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore…
Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks…like me in a smashed mirror!
And Will? Why he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? How can it happen to them?
But Jim, now, he sees it happen, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, and he sees it finish, he licks the wounds he expected, and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn’t know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will’s putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim’s ducking, weaving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.
For, he thought, it’s a special hour. Women never wake then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men in middle age? They know that hour well. Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death!
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.
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.
Miss Foley had first noticed, some years ago, that her house was crowded with bright shadows of herself. Best, then, to ignore the cold sheets of December ice in the hall, above the bureaus, in the bath. Best skate the thin ice, lightly. Paused, the weight of your attention might crack the shell. Plunged through the crust, you might drown in depths so cold, so remote, that all the Past lay carved in tombstone marbles there. Ice water would syringe your veins. Transfixed at the mirror still, you would stand forever, unable to lift your gaze from the proofs of Time.
“Oh, Jim, Jim, you do see, don’t you? Everything in its time, like the preacher said only last month, everything one by one, not two by two, will you remember?”
“[…] Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?”
“Since always.”
“Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. […]”
“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.”
“‘For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring, or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles—breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.’”
“Then—” Will swallowed— “does that make us…summer people?”
“Not quite.” Charles Halloway shook his head. “Oh, you’re nearer summer than me. If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that’s long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we’ve stashed away. But there are times when we’re all autumn people.”
“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.”
“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.”
And then, at last, he gave the maze, the mirrors, and all Time ahead, Beyond, Around, Above, Behind, Beneath or squandered inside himself, the only answer possible.
He opened his mouth very wide, and let the loudest sound of all free.
The Witch, if she were alive, would have known that sound, and died again.
“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.
The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it. So, there went the boys…and why not…follow?
