84 pages • 2 hours read
Ray BradburyThe Illustrated Man
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Story 4
Story 4 Summary: “The Highway”
Hernando, a farmer somewhere south of the border, waits for the rain to stop so he can continue plowing. Nearby, the concrete river of a highway often brings American travelers: “Over the years there had not been an hour” (56) when a tourist had not pulled up asking to take a picture of Hernando working, often requesting he put on his hat and pose.
At his hut, Hernando and his wife discuss how something big must have happened today. The road is empty. Hernando walks back to the field in a pair of shoes he had made with a tire salvaged from a car crash nearby.
Suddenly, hundreds of cars begin streaming down the highway, heading north “like a funeral cortege” (57). The last car stops in front of Hernando’s field; the radiator needs water. Its young inhabitants don’t care that their clothing is soaked with rain: “none complained, and this was unusual. Always before they complained; of rain, of heat, of time, of cold, of distance” (58). Instead, they are frightened and impatient, so Hernando hurries to bring them water in a hubcap, another “gift from the highway” (58).
When he comments on the unusual traffic, the young people start crying. The driver is surprised that Hernando has not heard “it’s happened” (59). Hernando, unsettled, looks up at the sky, which is black with rain. He refuses pay, for which the young people are grateful. They clarify that the atomic war has come, “the end of the world” (60), and continue their rush to the border.
Hernando watches the empty road, which he is now convinced would be empty for a long time. The sun breaks through the clouds, and “the jungle was very green; everything was fresh” (60). He takes up his plow again. His wife asks what happened; Hernando tells her it is nothing: “What does they mean,” he wonders, “‘the world’?” (61)
Story 4 Analysis
As he did in “The Other Foot,” Bradbury inhabits the perspective of someone other than the white majority of 1950s America. Following the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, Americans were obsessed with the possibility of nuclear warfare. In 1951, the Cold War was just beginning to heat up, spurring interest in underground bunkers and fantasies about what life might be like in a new Atomic Age. In “The Highway,” Bradbury reorients the reader to a different point of view. For Hernando, a nuclear war far from ends his world—it improves it.
Before the event happens, Bradbury emphasizes the tourists’ condescension towards Hernando. While he and his wife occasionally benefited from American materials—shoes with a rubber sole made of tire, a hubcap water dish—the Americans also asked him to perform for their photos, even as he tried to work, and demanded his resources. His simple lifestyle is a sideshow for their modern society.
In contrast, after the event, the young people are halted in their flight by their over-dependence on technology. Their car breaks down, a problem solved by something as simple and crucial as water, which Hernando provides. As the tourists leave in a panic, oblivious to the growth and life around them, the sun comes out. The jungle is lush and green. The widespread consequences of nuclear fallout were unknown in Bradbury’s time, only becoming common knowledge in the 1960s. As a result, he can imagine a sort of utopia springing up in the remote parts of the world after an atomic war, once the Americans have left it behind.
Bradbury is fond of this sort of subversion of expectations: Societies that were denigrated by the American upper class will thrive after technology and greed destroy the United States. He touched on this theme obliquely in “The Other Foot,” when the Martians prosper as the Earthmen destroy themselves with nuclear combat, and he will return to it in “The Fox and the Forest.”
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