I was Recently assigned to read and analyze this short story. Typically I wouldn't put much thought into such an assignment, but I really enjoyed the story and have been trying to find the underlying point. If anyone has any ideas or perhaps other sites I could visit, please help out



[This message has been edited by jaywalsh (edited 09-22-2003).]

This tragic story is a metaphor for fear of the father figure and repressed sexuality.

Seriously, though, try starting at lonliness and see where you end up. Good luck, Jaywalsh.

Thanks very much, was most helpful. I was convinced it was somehow a commentary on time, and couldn't quite make the right connections.

Always good to start with the author's perspective. Here's what Ray said about it:

"I wrote dinosaur stories. One, caused by 'The Lost World' rose from the sea late at night and fell in love with a lighthouse and the cry of the foghorn. The fognorn itself was a super metaphor of all the melancholy funerals and sad rememberances in history. That story, with its haunted dinosaur and foghorn, I sent to John Huston, who then hired me to write the screenplay of 'Moby-Dick,' a book swarming with immense images -- metaphors -- from the nineteenth century."

From: RAY BRADBURY: AN ILLUSTRATED LIFE. A JOURNEY TO FAR METAPHOR. by Jerry Weist. William Morrow, NY. 2002. (From the Introduction, by Ray Bradbury. p. xxi)

I think there are two themes in this story.

One is the one already addressed, and that is the theme of loneliness and sadness. A sense of melancholy that each person will encounter at some time in his or her life. In this case, the loneliness is thousands or millions of years old and is apparently satisfied by the sound of the Fog Horn in the light house -- as sound created by artificial construct, rather than from natural causes.

The monster hears these sounds -- imitative of his own sounds -- and over a period of months, makes his way out of the very depths of the ocean to see the cause of the sound. In the end, the sound does not overcome his loneliness, but increases it, in a way. It seems to hold out the promise of companionship and then pulls it away. The "monster" is angry and frustrated and strikes out at the lighthouse, destroying it; and then retreats back to "the Deeps".

The other thing this story is about is the mystery of the earth. For Bradbury, there is always the unfathomable depths of the ocean floor, or the mysteries of an unknown planet, or the darkness of the ravine. A part of this story deals with those dark places that still exist in the world. For all our modernity and technology, we have not been able to conquer the "dark places" in the world. I believe this is also directed to the fact that each person has a dark, unexplored and unknown component inside himself.

The descriptions given of the ocean's mystery, coldness and darkness evoke some of the descriptions of the heart of unexplored Africa in Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, where the darkness of the continent and the unexplored mystery of the human soul are explored in great detail.

Bradbury's story, "The Dwarf" explores the theme of loneliness in a more personalized context.

"Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more."

I think you haven't paid much attention to the theme of destroying the Horn by the monster. The angry feelings to what you love, but cannot get - is the basic idea of the story, IMHO.