Dandelion Wine (Style)

Style

Setting

In Dandelion Wine, the setting of Green Town becomes almost another character. On the one hand, Bradbury has been very clear that he modeled Green Town after his own childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. According to Bradbury, there were tree-lined streets, people sitting on porches on a summer evening, and even a frightening dark ravine. However, Green Town becomes mythic in its significance to Dandelion Wine. The town is isolated, surrounded by a deep forest, with no connection to the outside world. Symbolically, the town is a kind of Garden of Eden for Doug, the place where one day he realizes he is alive. Likewise, the Lonely One, skulking about in the ravine is akin to the serpent in Eden, the serpent who brings death to humankind. Doug’s growing awareness of life and death is paralleled by Green Town’s gradual change from an isolated city where no one new arrives and no one ever leaves to a town where people die, and people go away. For Doug, this new knowledge of his city is dangerous; it is after witnessing the murdered corpse in the ravine that he falls into the coma that nearly wins him for death. Thus, while Green Town is simply the setting, it provides the mythological grounding for the novel.

Archetypes

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung theorized that there are particular, images, character types, settings and stories that operate across cultures, and that these archetypes are embedded deep within the human subconscious. Bradbury, who writes frequently in books such as Zen and the Art of Writing about tapping his own subconscious mind for material, makes use of the idea of the archetype in Dandelion Wine. Douglas is the archetypal young hero and his story is the archetypal quest story. In this type of story, the hero is nearly always a young person about to enter adulthood who receives a calling that starts him or her on his journey. For Douglas, the quest is metaphoric as he moves through a series of initiatory rites designed to bring him from childhood into adulthood. He first is aware of this on the day his father takes him to pick grapes. He realizes that his father and his grandfather “live on riddles;” that is, they have knowledge that is outside of his understanding as a child. However, when he is in the forest, he receives the archetypal call when he realizes that this is the day when everything will change. He is aware of some presence outside himself ready to pounce. When this “something” finally makes itself known, “the world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.” From this moment on, with the utter certainty that he is alive, Douglas begins his journey to adulthood, encountering loss through both death and change, and his own near death.

Other archetypes that Doug encounters in Dandelion Wine include wise, older helpers such as his Grandfather and Colonel Freeleigh. He also encounters evil in the form of The Lonely One. In an archetypal subplot, through his dream, he wanders in the “other world” where he sees John Huff, the Happiness Machine, the trolley, Colonel Freeleigh, and his great-grandma, all people and things that have passed out of his life. Mr. Jonas, then, plays the role of spiritual guide, the archetypal character who brings Douglas home from the otherworld. Douglas’s awakening from his fever dream signifies a rebirth, and the end of his metaphoric journey. He is no longer a child, having earned his adulthood.