Critical Introduction

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is, along with Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, one of the most influential American science fiction writers, but it is his dystopian Fahrenheit 451 for which he is best known among the reading public. Both of those strands—the speculative science and the dread of some newer, horrible world—combine in the short story “Fever Dream” (1948). Bradbury uses the isolation and terror that can accompany illness, and intensifies it by making the central character a child whose perceptions are dismissed by adults and experts. Out of the mix springs the horror of losing oneself, the horror of the Cartesian mind-body split becoming terribly skewed.

Like Dracula before it, “Fever Dream” plays on the fear of contagion: it is the means by which Charles is lost in his own body and, we are to understand, the means by which humanity will ultimately fall. Unlike in Dracula—or any text included in this volume—here the monster is a child. Charles looks no different than he did before he was sick, but he has been remade by invading infection into something sinister: he looks and medically checks out as human, but he is an evil facsimile of a human, testing his powers and looking to wreak havoc on the human world.

Reading Questions

Bradbury, excellent writer that he is, does not outright state that Charles is now a monstrous collection of germs. The ants and the third-person narration strongly suggest that he is a monster, but one could also read the story as a mental break due to the fever. Which reading seems most likely to you? If he is composed of “evil” germ-directed cells, does that make him a monster? If he has suffered a mental break and will indeed go on to do terrible crimes as an adult, does that make him a monster? Why?

Charles is thirteen years old at the time of this story. How does his young age affect the way you read him and this story? Does it influence the way you answered the previous reading question? Does it increase your sense of dread?