30 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Other Foot
Fiction | Short Story | 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.
Literary Devices
Simile
Bradbury is fond of lyrical similes, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as.” In “The Other Foot,” the children describe the hypothetical white skin of the approaching visitor, comparing it to dust, milk, chalk, and flowers. This inadvertently highlights the inaccuracy of the term “white” and “black” as a descriptor for pale or dark skin; ultimately, describing race this way is reductive.
As the story progresses, the comparisons turn more dangerous. Guns sticking up out of cars are “like telescopes sighting all the evils of the world coming to an end” (Paragraph 74); Willie searches for weapons while “cursing like a crazy man” (Paragraph 63); the crowd looks “like one dark body with a thousand arms” (Paragraph 84) and their heads move “like marionette heads on a single string” (Paragraph 120). The repeated use of similes allows Bradbury to connect ordinary, commonplace things to larger symbols. Thus, a crowd of people watching a single object becomes a set of Willie’s puppets, guns become instruments of seeing, and the Martian mob becomes a single, terrifying monster.
Metaphor
With metaphor, something is compared to something else without using “like” or “as.” Willie’s rope is described as “hairy,” suggesting that it is a living thing. The metaphors surrounding the old man suggest his physical delicacy; the door opens with “a breath of oxygen” (Paragraph 121) and he is compared to a winter bush. The wall is Hattie’s way of understanding the crowd’s hatred toward the old man. She views breaking Willie’s verbal spell as removing a “keystone” that will send the entire structure crashing to the ground. Because so much of the action of the story takes place in Hattie’s mind, figurative language is Bradbury’s primary tool for demonstrating the high stakes of the narrative.
Foreshadowing
Most of “The Other Foot” consists of preparation for a future event. The first sentence of the story mentions people coming out of “restaurants and cafés and hotels,” the same institutions from which Black Americans were once banned and from which the Martians hope to ban white newcomers (Paragraph 1). The ropes and guns first appear as vague suggestions before Willie begins laying out plans to reinstitute racial segregation by force.
Unlike other foreshadowing-heavy stories such as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), “The Other Foot” is remarkably clear in what it foretells. Although actual references to lynching are relatively few, Hattie’s use of the word when she speaks to the Browns changes the tone of the story, even as the Browns laugh at her for saying it. By the story’s climax, a mob holding guns and ropes will be waiting to greet the old man in a near-perfect mirror of the lynch mobs of old.
Allusion
Ray Bradbury was extraordinarily well-read, even for a professional writer, and liked to work allusions into his work wherever possible, or references without explicit mention. In the case of “The Other Foot,” Bradbury mentions both real-life events such as lynchings and other extrajudicial racial violence and elements of mythology and religion. The central intimations in the story are religious; Hattie invokes Christianity early on, to which Willie replies: “I’m not feeling Christian” (Paragraph 52) and proceeds to organize an extrajudicial killing. While the old man’s references to God could be interpreted as applying to any Abrahamic faith or to a nonspecific deist belief system, the larger context of the story (and the time and place in which it was written) give him the air of an Old Testament prophet or an early Christian martyr, right down to his refusal to shave before the meeting, perhaps as a show of grief or humility. Perhaps the most important allusion in the story, however, is Willie’s internal monologue about Greenwater with its reference to “white mortuaries,” a thinly veiled restatement of “whited Sepulchres” from the New Testament, a metaphor Jesus used for hypocrisy. By evoking the same in Willie’s moment of crisis, Bradbury tells Willie and the audience that reenacting racist violence in the name of revenge is no better than committing the original violence in the first place.
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By Ray Bradbury
