Deborah
ENGL 3850-02N
Supernatural Lit
Dr. Coats
31 March, 1998
"What do you want, you moon-faced assassin of joy?"
Somehow, I knew-- this being a Bradbury and all that-- that the mother was not crazy and that the parents would both be dead by the end of the story. What I didn't expect was the violence of which the baby was capable. He must have had considerable conviction of purpose to persist night after night in his aim. Those of us who have nothing to savor but the hope of revenge know the exultation the child might have felt in accomplishing the twofold plan.
Bradbury tells his story from three different points of view: the agonized mother who suffered while bringing the child into the world, the father who wants to have faith in the child and the doctor's prognosis but finds himself believing the truth instead, and the doctor, whose Hippocratic oath is contested at the end when he realizes the monstrous capabilities of the child. Each point of view is important to the flow of the story. If only the mother's had been shown, the story would have ended with her death. If only the father's, the reader would not have understood the mother's pain and anguish at the betrayal from her flesh and blood. If only the Doctor's, we would not see the growing terror in the house from the family under siege.
The commonly held beliefs about how a mother should feel about her offspring are often disturbed by what is diagnosed by professionals as "Post-Partum Depression." This mother does not feel as if this label is accurate but she is helpless and unable to prove it. By the time others realize it, too, it is over. But the child does not win. The doctor who brought him into the world with a scalpel removes him from it with the same instrument.