84 pages • 2-hour read
The Illustrated Man
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Story 8
Story 8 Summary: “The Last Night of the World”
It’s October 19, 1969. Over coffee, a man asks his wife, “What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” She says she doesn’t know and checks if he’s serious. He confirms that he is. It is not a war or a bomb, he says, just a feeling he has—“the closing of a book” (112). He tells her about a strange dream he had four nights before, where a voice said things would stop on Earth. His coworker Stan Willis and others confirmed they had the same dream—it seems everyone has. The world will stop sometime during the night.
The wife wonders if they deserve this. Her husband replies that “It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just things didn’t work out” (113). The wife admits she and other housewives in the neighborhood have had the dream too. The couple is not afraid because this seems to be a logical conclusion. They have not been egregiously bad people but have not been very good either. Rather, they just let the world do awful things around them. They reflect that they will miss only each other, their daughters, and the little pleasures of life, like a glass of ice water when it is hot.
They wonder what to do with their time and decide to spend it as they always have. They wash the dishes and put their daughters to bed, leaving the door cracked. The wife wonders if the children know; the husband is confident they do not. They spend their evening reading the paper, listening to music, and talking. The husband kisses his wife before bed: “We’ve been good to each other, anyway,” she says (116). They do not cry, enjoying the feeling of the clean sheets. They both agree that they are tired; that everyone is tired. The wife gets up out of bed to turn off the water she had left running in the sink. They laugh about it and wish each other good night.
Story 8 Analysis
In “The Last Night,” Bradbury juxtaposes the ominous with a peaceful domestic scene: A husband and wife discuss the end of the world over coffee. Unlike the astronauts in “Kaleidoscope,” who reacted with panic and anger to their impending death, these protagonists face the end with calm acceptance.
The story was published in 1951, only six years after the end of World War II and four years into the Cold War. The anxieties of the time are reflected in the wife’s initial questions about atomic bombs and germ warfare, but this doomsday event seems to be painless rather than violent. Here, Bradbury presents absolute knowledge as a source of peace rather than panic. Fear and uncertainty had previously isolated the couple from each other—while the husband had had some confirmation of the truth of the dream from his work friends, and the wife from her neighborhood friends, they hadn’t spoken to each other about it. Their casual conversation seems to solidify the truth and inevitability of it, which paradoxically leads to acceptance and peace.
Bradbury also spotlights the responsibility people have for their wider community versus their concentration on their own lives. The things the couple treasures are mundane, private, and often sensory pleasures: a cold glass of water, clean sheets, and each other. Bradbury does not necessarily condemn their prioritization of these comforts. Many of his other protagonists, like those in “The Veldt,” would do well to pay more attention to the simple pleasures of life. However, the protagonists in “The Last Night” seem to understand that their disinterest in the world has somehow contributed to its deserving to end. They were good to each other but disconnected to the evils of everyone else. Their sin was not intentional; rather, it was one of omission.
As with many of his stories, Bradbury ends on an ambiguous note: As the husband and wife say good night, readers are left wondering if this was actually the last night of the world or not.
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