Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed

The story is structured as a series of vignettes depicting key moments in the Bittering family’s experience in the Earth settlement on Mars. Beginning with the scene of their arrival, the narrative then jumps forward in time to describe the early days of their life on Mars, the arrival of the news that an atomic bomb has hit New York, and other scenes showing the family’s slow assimilation to Mars. These episodes culminate in the last scene featuring the Bitterings, when Harry and Cora look back on the abandoned Earth settlement. The twist of the final scene changes the orientation of the narrative; instead of centering the Bitterings, it unfolds from the perspective of the American military officials exploring the empty settlement. Their conviction that the people living in the villas are Martian and not the settlers from Earth is supported by the narrative structure; it is as if the Bitterings are now too “alien” to lend their perspective, so the conclusion to their story can only be told via the more accessible vantage point of people newly come from Earth. The cyclical structure of the story, beginning and ending with an arrival on Mars, is one of several hints that these newcomers will likewise adopt a Martian way of life, cementing the theme of Colonization and the Repetition of History.

The Bitterings’ loss of centering perspective coincides with the loss of their original identities. The opening scene describes only “a family,” composed of “a man, a woman, and three children” (631). It is only as the narrative moves forward that it is stated that “their name was Bittering” (631). The depersonalized description of the family in the opening scene anticipates the final erasure of their identity, as if foreshadowing in this first encounter with Mars the changes to come. The story’s exploration of The Meaning of Names clarifies that these changes are not simply superficial. The Bitterings’ eldest child, Dan, asks if he can change his name to the Martian “Linnl,” explaining to his parents that when they call him “Dan” he feels “that’s not [his] name” (640). The younger children follow suit.

The textual treatment of Harry’s name underscores that becoming Martian means a loss of his Earth identity and perhaps his individualism. When Harry asks the other men in the village for help building a rocket home, they are described as a group; they stare and laugh at him as if they are one collective being, undifferentiated into individual speakers and all seeming to have the same opinions. This contrasts with Harry’s singularity in opposing them, and as if to mock this, they assert his name hyperbolically at the end of every sentence, chiding, “A rocket, Harry? To go back to all that trouble? Oh, Harry!” (636). The conflict recurs when Harry makes the final decision to leave the Earth settlement with the other villagers. In that scene, he “put his hand to his head. He thought of the silly rocket, himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, so alone” (641). To continue working on the rocket, his last hope of returning to Earth, is to be entirely alone; to go with the other settlers means sacrificing his individuality for the sake of integration. In this juxtaposition of individualism versus collectivism, as well as in Harry’s emphasis on industriousness, there are traces of the story’s Cold War context. Nevertheless, it isn’t clear that Harry’s attitude is the correct one. The technology that Harry presumably uses to build his rocket was historically the same technology that led to advances in nuclear weaponry. By the end of the story, Harry is as nameless as the other “Martians” in the hills around the Earth settlement, but he is also happier than he has been throughout the story.

Harry’s assimilation into Martian existence does come at a definite cost. This is apparent in the imagery of fossilization, ossification, and slow decay that surrounds Harry’s fears about adapting to this new climate. When they first arrive, Harry imagines “the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone” and feels “submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past” (631). This imagery resurfaces when he tells his wife he feels “like a salt crystal […] being washed away” and when he imagines “a river of wind [that] submerged the house” (632). However, Harry eventually finds comfort in the fossilization that the Martian climate threatens. In the scene where he swims with his wife and children in the canals, finally agreeing to take a break from work, he sits below the water and “[feels] the steady, slow current drift him easily” (640). As Harry finds peace in the water that threatens to wash away his personality, he becomes more amenable to the Martian way of life that the others have adopted. However, this peace seems to come at the cost of his inner self, which puts up its final resistance as he makes the decision to leave for the villas: “No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No!” (642). The language here—e.g., “suffocating”—suggests the death of his innermost self, yet by avoiding change Harry risks actual death, as in his refusal to eat the Martian food.

This theme of Change as Death, Change as Survival arrives at no simple resolution. The “Martians” have a vitality that the Earth settlers lacked; Harry and Cora both look younger than they did at the beginning of the story, and the lieutenant reporting on the supposed aliens comments on how “healthy” they look. At the same time, becoming Martian turns Harry into a kind of fossil, his “intellect” and “past” eroded away, no longer an active agent in the story but an alien form left to be discovered by the next wave of Earth settlers. Indeed, the descriptions of the abandoned Earth village parallel those of the Martian ruins “that time has worn with a crushing pressure of years” (631), the metaphor of compacted earth also suggestive of fossils. Though only a summer has passed when Harry and Cora look back on the village and decide to stay in the villas, it appears long abandoned; they think about how foolish the Earth people were and say they are glad they are gone, as if it is the Earth civilization, not the Martian one, that now belongs to a distant past. The slow, almost unchanging time that is suggested by these images of fossils and long decay contrasts with the alarm clock the Bitterings woke up to while still in the Earth village. The villagers’ injunction to stop working, directed at Harry when he is working on his rocket, is a further instance of slow or stalled time contrasted with active time. These opposing temporalities suggest the movement of human progress as contrasted with the end of human history amid the Martian way of life.