It is not until the last story that the narrator’s own experience becomes entangled in that of the Illustrated Man and his tattoos. The use of tattoos also serves to underscore the pervading sense of human disconnection recurrent throughout the stories. This imagery would have further sensationalized the newly popular genre of speculative fiction where interplanetary colonization, alternative earths, automated homes, and AR would have been groundbreaking concepts to a 1950s audience. While the cover of the first edition only hints at nudity and tattoos, by the second edition, the art more closely resembled popular pulp fiction illustrations of the time-a format where many of these stories had been previously published-and featured the back of a seated, nude, fully tattooed man. Not only was it an original premise for the time but having a fully tattooed person on the book cover would have been titillating for many Americans. However, Bradbury’s use of tattoos as literary device was a new and unique twist in this storytelling tradition. Many of the stories selected for The Illustrated Man had been previously published and needed such a device to link them into a single compendium. From Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights to Crypt Keeper in Tales from the Crypt, authors have used a mysterious storyteller to set the stage for loosely connected short stories. Ray Bradbury’s use of the Illustrated Man is a literary device common throughout history.
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