A Stylistic Analysis of Lexicon in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the novel’s themes, using the analytic model developed by Leech and Short (2007). The study’s focus is on the lexical category—general lexicon, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs—of chapters that are stylistically representative of Bradbury’s descriptive and metaphorically-rich style.