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 18
Story 18 Summary: “The Illustrated Man”
William Philippus Phelps works in a carnival as a Tattooed Man. He is an obese man with “almost feminine breasts.” On his platform, he watches his wife, Lisabeth, rip tickets: She stares at “the silver buckles of passing men” (258). The rose tattoos on his hands shrivel.
William reflects on why he had gotten the tattoos. Marital strife had caused him to binge eat and gain weight. Lisabeth had been disgusted by him, and the carnival boss threatened to fire him from his job as a tent man. The carnival had no need of a Fat Man, but it could use a Tattooed Man.
A month ago, William had learned of a tattoo artist in the Wisconsin hills. He found her in a shack, a witch-like figure whose eyes, nose, and ears are sewn shut. Undisturbed dust showed that she had been there a long time. She invited William in, claiming she is lonely. When he hesitated, she showed him a tattooed portrait of himself on her palm, which she said has been there for 50 years. She claimed to know him, and “the Deep Past and the Clear Present and the even Deeper Future” (261). She wanted to give him tattoos depicting the future, making him the only real Illustrated Man in the universe.
Drunk, William rushed home to show Lisabeth his incredible tattoos, but she called him a freak. He had gotten the tattoos to keep his job, but mostly to hide his fat from Lisabeth and from himself. There are two tattoos that are still covered on his chest and back. The old woman forbade him from looking at them until later, as they will reveal the Future. She refused pay and sent him away, content in her work, “for I make [the tattoos] fit each man himself and what is inside him” (263).
On Saturday night, the carnival throws an unveiling of William’s chest tattoo. At first the crowd is impressed by the lifelike images, but when William removes the bandage on his chest, they are horrified. The tattoo underneath shows William strangling Lisabeth. Seeing it, the rose tattoos on his hands wither and die.
Afterwards, a rattled Lisabeth threatens to leave William if he does not get rid of the tattoos. He tries, but a “skin man” (267) is unable to remove them—they go too deep. The carnival boss tries to take a sneak peek at the tattoo on William’s back, but there is nothing there.
As William tries various methods to remove the tattoos, he and Lisabeth argue. She mercilessly berates and emasculates him, calling him a fat woman. Powered by all the food he had eaten, the roses transformed into carnivorous plants, William grabs Lisabeth’s throat, “a frantic gesture of love” (271), and strangles her.
The other circus freaks let him leave at first, then pursue him: “Tired of running away,” William waves them over (273). They surround him, ready to kill him, and take off the remaining bandage. It shows a mise-en-abyme, an image of that very scene—the carnies about to kill William—repeated endlessly within the tattoo on William’s back.
Story 18 Analysis
In this story, Bradbury provides the backstory for the Illustrated Man met in the Prologue. Readers learn of William’s fractured relationship with his wife, Lisabeth, and how their fighting makes him binge eat and gain weight. Food represents a veiled criticism from Bradbury on America’s insatiable consumerism and overconsumption. Thus, before William even gets tattooed, he feels ill at ease in his skin: His obesity has feminized his body, making him unattractive to Lisabeth and foreign to himself.
While William wants to keep his job, he gets tattooed primarily to hide the nature of himself—his obesity—and, in doing so, reclaim the narrative about his own body. The tragedy of the tattoos, then, is not that they are as ugly as Lisabeth claims—the narrator and the carnival audience find them captivating. William’s tattoos are tragic because, like his obesity, they dictate the terms of his life. He cannot remove them. They bother him on sight, and the truths they reveal frighten people—all of which William can’t change. After getting tattooed, the way society perceives him is even less in his control than before. This image of the lonely outsider, rejected by others, is a through line of Bradbury’s work.
There is also a supernatural element to the tattoos. They are applied with magic ink by a witch, whose lack of sight links her to a literary tradition associating blindness with prophecy. Her eyes, nose, and ears being bound with twine also connect her to the ancient Greek Fates, goddesses who spun the thread of life that dictates men’s destinies. Her guarantee that the tattoos will predict the future introduces the paradox of free will to the story. Was the Illustrated Man fated to kill Lisabeth all along? Or did his seeing the act in his tattoo influence him, in some way, to do so? The moving images of the Illustrations resemble modern television and movies. Through questioning William’s free will, Bradbury wonders, then, what dictating force imaginative media might have on real people’s behaviors and actions.
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