The Martian Chronicles

In the guise of a romantic comedy of errors, Bradbury asks the reader to consider the disparity between ideology and reality. The apparent comedy of Gripp’s disillusionment with Genevene is subverted by the story’s insistence upon the loneliness he feels. The suggestion is that he is willing to do anything to alleviate it, but when he is given the chance, he wholly rejects it. The limited perspective of Gripp’s third-person narration, however, belittles women, revealing him as having very limited interaction with them. He is more used to viewing them as ideals of his own mind rather than human beings with their own agency. This sharpens the theme of the story—while reinforcing Bradbury’s pessimism regarding human nature—that failure is certain when human beings pursue projected fantasies.      

The nature of idealizing is cast against the abandoned settlements on Mars, suggesting the same process led humans through their colonization, creating their idealized nostalgic villages, and importing the ideology of nostalgia—the dangerous notion of the perfection of the past, and the reachable goal it purportedly implies. Gripp’s disillusionment reveals how frail this practice is, and his decision to flee, rather than attempt to create a new human settlement, leaves the story pessimistic as to human nature in the face of an ideology not matching with reality.

Despite the derisive nature of Genevieve’s representation though Walter’s perspective, her motivation in staying on Mars aligns with several of the other outsiders in the collection. Much like Stendhal in “Usher II” she seeks to live her own authentic life according to her own values, which is the purported motivation behind most of the settlers on Mars. In this sense, she is the last of the humans on Mars who is upholding the tradition of what brought them there in the first place, while Gripp is living an inauthentic life, hiding himself in loneliness, unable to accept what he has found.