The story is not an allegory for any particular destructive force: it is probably too early a story to draw a clear link between the rain in the story and the effects of a nuclear attack, and a postcolonial reading, where the Earthmen on an alien planet are at the mercy of the foreign environment (whose rainforest or jungle perhaps suggests colonial Africa), is not borne out by the other details of the story. In the last analysis, Bradbury is using the imagery of the ‘long rain’ as a metaphor for some incessant and potentially deadly force which drives the exposed person mad before killing them. (Indeed, perhaps the rainfall against his body is the ‘other men’ he senses ‘moving’ towards him.) Although it makes logical sense for the lieutenant to remove his wet clothes at this point, the other details suggest that this is the final act of a man experiencing hallucinations shortly before death.Ī darker and more troubling analysis of the ending to Bradbury’s story sees the lieutenant’s fantasy of the Sun Dome as the very thing which leads to his death: in giving in to the delicious illusion of the dome, and tricking himself into thinking it is reality, he removes his clothes and thus condemns his body to death among the rains, rains which his mind has ceased to register. It is said that people about to die from hypothermia remove their clothes, in an act referred to as ‘paradoxical undressing’.

We might also wonder at that final description of the lieutenant tearing off his clothes.

The earthmen ray bradbury