[issybird]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Yes, I loved the Colonel as well. It seems to me that there is a theme of memory running through the book - Bradbury's memories of his childhood and the town in which he was a boy, but also the memories of the Colonel, which died with him, and those of the other old people in the book, Helen Loomis, Mrs Bentley, and Great-Grandma. .

I found some of these contradictory, and some of that in a good way, some not good.

The good as expressed by Whitman's:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I thought there was a disconnect between the Colonel as time machine and Mrs. Bentley whose memories were discredited. My explanation is that the Colonel was remembering great events while Mrs. Bentley only held onto personal history and I have some sympathy for that, and for Mrs. Bentley's husband's advice to her to let the past go. However, and I say this with some trepidation given the battle in the Three Musketeers thread, I think that was due in part to the gender divide and that's a little more unsettling. It was natural that the boys would thrill to the memory of battles, but girls' lives are of value too, but perhaps not so much for the 12-year old Doug. Girls mostly figured tangentially at most in these stories.

Another similar disconnect was between the Happiness Machine (bad) and the way Miss Loomis was able to bring Bill with her as she traveled in her memories. But there's a sting in that; is Bill to live his life waiting for death and rebirth? That seems to contradict the sense of living in one's life now.

Originally Posted by Catlady

The interest in old people and their memories is one of the things that felt false to me, given Doug's supposed age of 12.

I thought the choice of the age of 12 was deliberate, as the last year of unalloyed boyhood. In another year the 13-year old Doug would have other interests and girls would figure more prominently. It recalls Penrod to me and other stories of that ilk in that.

In fact, Doug was older than Bradbury was in 1928 and I imagine that year was chosen for the reasons stated upthread; the last full year before the Depression hit and even the last year of the Coolidge presidency, as a personification of a certain rural idyll.