What's REALLY with some of those characters in Ray Bradbury stories?
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While reading an article in a recent news magazine, I see characters in Bradbury stories now have simple medical reasonings behind their behaviours. Of course, this can be transferred to any character in any book ever written. But for now, I'll pick on ol' Ray.
So, I begin with:

~The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl~

Here we have a Mr. William Acton "...who looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with those same ten whorled fingers...."

The remainder of the story has Mr. Acton in a flurry iof much activity, attempting to 'clean-up' any possible trace of his fingerprints at the crime scene, to the point of cleaning up finger-prints where there just arn't any...to his ultimate demise...

So, here's the modern analysis:

Mr. William Acton suffers, likely among other things, with a form of OCD, obsessive-compulsive-disorder. And the answer is in the brain...principally in a small, almond=shaped structure in the brain called the amygdala, the place where danger is processed and evaluated. But now discovered there are 3 additional places for this compulsive order: the orbital frontal cortex, the caudate nucleus, and the thalamus. All these areas are linked along a circuit. And abnormally active in people like...William Acton. So now we know why he thought there were his fingerprints at the bottom of the fruit bowl.

Anyone for figuring out Mr. Dark, from 'Something Wicked'?

My own view is that Mr. Dark needs no psychological or neurological analysis. He represents the personification of evil and temptation and also represents the various means of tempation to which man is so infamously susceptible. The link between the physical propoerties of the brain and the psychological/spiritual dimensions of man are definitely fascinating, and merit watching. In my own view, evil is evil--whether it comes from a real satanic power or from a skewed neuro-biological problem.

I guess, from a Bradburian perspective, I think Mr. Dark is Bradbury's metaphor for pure evil and for understanding how it works and how to defeat it.

Definitely an interesting question. Nard, hope you're doing well!

Anytime you look for a psychological or medical analysis, you are necessarily looking at a cause-effect scenario. I don't think that's possible with an archetype (like Mr. Dark). Archetypes don't respond to the environment (or at least, they don't modify themselves in response to it.)

mycroftholmes:
I wouldn't consider Mr. Dark an archetype. How about Faust and the devil? Or The Devil and Daniel Webster? The likes of a Frankenstein would be more an archetype, wouldn't you say? Off hand, I can't recall anyone resembling a Frankenstein before Mary Shelley's. But I can pull other semblances of a Mr. Dark from out of literature, I am sure.

On the other hand, should we consider the psychology of the characters in 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' that are swept into the freak sideshow because of their own particular lusts? Now there's a study for ya!

I teach my students to apply different 'readings' or critical approaches to different texts. For instance, they might describe a feminist reading of Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or a Marxist reading of King Lear.
So what you're describing is a psychoanalytical reading of Something Wicked, where you explain the behaviour and motivations of characters (and to a degree, deduce the psychology of the author). It does sound like someone's PHD in the making (but not mine!)

Mr. Kordell:

Maybe I used my terms wrong. I meant that Mr. Dark was the epitome, a sort of essence, an indivisible entity, thoroughly, homogenously evil. As an aside, when I looked in the dictionary to clarify my thoughts, I found that Jung called an archetype a thing passed down in our consciousness through the generations, a thing that guides our perceptions and fears--kind of like what member-Mr.-Dark said about "the various means of tempation to which man is so infamously susceptible."

But it's been far too long since I read SWTWC.

But now you've got me wondering--do you think Faust and Webster were or weren't archetypes?

I've always thought that Mr. Dark was some kind of demon in human form traveling the country collecting souls and adding them to his sideshow.
Perhaps that would be too simple an explanation tough. it has been too long for me as well since I read Something wicked.

Montag, the epitome of hope, vs. Beatty, the epitome of cynicism.
or
The Hopeless Romantic vs. the Powerful Burner!