As Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade metaphorically battle evil in the form of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, the young boys are at a clear disadvantage. The carnival preys on the boys’ curiosity and desires, and while Will and Jim struggle with wanting to ride the magical carousel (even though they know they shouldn’t), the danger of Cooger and Dark inches closer and closer. Charles, Will’s father, is determined to save his son and Jim, and he turns to the town library for answers. The stacks of books and old newspapers give Charles valuable insight into who, and what, Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show is, but they don’t bring him any closer to defeating its evil power. Just as Charles begins to resign to hopelessness and admit defeat, he discovers that only love and happiness have the power to combat the evil of the carnival. Through Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury effectively argues the power of love, laughter, and happiness to defeat and overcome even the darkest evil.
When Mr. Dark, the leader of the carnival’s evil freak show, dispatches the Dust Witch, his most powerful freak, to stop Charles’s heart and clear the path to Will and Jim, laughter proves to be Charles’s most effective tool. As the gypsy corners Charles in the library, it seems that all is lost—until Charles begins to laugh. “Why?” he wonders. “Why am I…giggling…at such a time!?” As Charles collapses in hysterics, the Dust Witch retreats, wounded by the implied happiness of his laughter. Charles again goes up against the Dust Witch when he volunteers to perform Mr. Dark’s “World Famous BULLET TRICK!” In this attraction, Mr. Dark provides the volunteer with a rifle and a trick rubber bullet, and when the bullet is fired, the Dust Witch defies death and catches the bullet between her teeth. Instead of his initials, Charles carves a “mysterious crescent moon” onto the bullet, symbolic of his own smile. As Charles fires the rifle, both Charles and Will smile at the Dust Witch. The power of their smiles and the laughter of the crowd causes the witch to turn to dust, and she dies as a result of their happiness, which further reflects Bradbury’s central argument of the power of happiness and laughter in the face of evil.
Bradbury furthers this argument when Charles defeats the evil Mr. Dark using only the power of his love. When Mr. Dark disguises himself as Jed, a young, lost boy, and tries to lure Charles to his death, Charles grabs the tattooed boy and holds him, “pressing the boy, almost lovingly, close, very close.” Instead of fighting Mr. Dark’s evil with violence, Charles embraces the boy and responds with love. As Charles holds Jed close, Jed begins to scream “Murder!” and Charles knows his efforts are working. “I will do only good to you, Jed, Mr. Dark, Mr. Proprietor, boy,” Charles says. “I will simply hold you and watch you poison yourself.” Charles’s “good”—in this case, love—is Mr. Dark’s kryptonite. Charles continues to hold Jed “like father and son long apart, passionately met” until the images of the souls trapped in his tattoos begin to “shiver and fly this way and that.” As Mr. Dark’s tattoos “abandon” his illustrated body, he falls to the ground, dead and powerless. Similar to the Dust Witch, Charles physically destroys the wicked Mr. Dark using only his love, which is in keeping with Bradbury’s assertion of the power of love to overcome the darkness of evil.
Bradbury’s argument, however, does not end with Mr. Dark’s death. After Jim succumbs to his temptation to instantly become a man and gets on the magical carousel, he is ultimately saved by his friendship with Will. Will risks his own life to save Jim from the damning effects of the carousel, which implies that the love of their friendship is also incompatible with the evil of the carnival. What’s more, when Charles and Will do manage to pull Jim, unconscious and seemingly dead, from the sinister ride, their attempts to provide him with “artificial respirations” and chest compressions are useless, and Will fears Jim is gone. As Will begins to mourn the loss of his friend, however, Charles drags his son to his feet and produces a harmonica. In a display of pure silliness, Charles and Will dance and “do-si-do, hands extended, the harmonica seeping and guzzling raw tunes” until Jim begins to smile, the silliness of their dance sparking life back into him. Jim’s life is effectively saved by love, happiness, and laughter, as Will and Charles’s levity outshines the carnival’s evil and darkness.
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Love and Happiness ThemeTracker
Love and Happiness Quotes in Something Wicked This Way Comes
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!
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.
“[…] 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. […]”
“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.
He gathered the boy somewhat closer and thought, Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.
“Will!” His father savagely jabbed a finger at him and at Jim. “Damn it, Willy, all this, all these, Mr. Dark and his sort, they like crying, my God, they love tears! Jesus God, the more you bawl, the more they drink the salt off your chin. Wail and they suck your breath like cats. Get up! Get off your knees, damn it! Jump around! Whoop and holler! You hear! Shout, Will, sing, but most of all laugh, you got that, laugh!”
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?
