Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Something Wicked This Way Comes, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good vs. Evil
Age, Time, and Acceptance
Love and Happiness
Fear, the Supernatural, and the Unknown
Summary
Analysis
Jim stops running at the corner of Hickory and Main and looks down the street he and Will have come to call “the Theater.” Something happened on the street the previous summer, and since this “’thing’ happened,” everything has “changed,” including the houses, the wind, and the taste of the fruit growing on the trees. Jim begs Will to walk by the house with the window that looks in on the “stage with a curtain.” On this stage, “actors” utter “whispers Will does not understand.”
The fact that Will doesn’t understand what the people are doing is evidence of his youth and innocence, but watching the couple having sex (what happened in the theater) represents his fall from innocence. This fall and the nearby fruit tree carry biblical connotations of Genesis and the fall of man. Adam eats fruit from the tree of knowledge, which allows him to know the difference between good and evil, just as Will and Jim gain knowledge of good and evil through the carnival.
Themes
Will remembers that day well. While hanging from a nearby fruit tree with Jim, the two boys could see perfectly into the window with the “peculiar stage where people, all knowing, flourished shirts about their heads, let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animal-crazy, naked, like shivering horses, hands out to touch each other.”
The couple is clearly having sex, and Will and Jim are spying. Like the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, their spying on this adult act is forbidden. They lose a kind of innocence here, in exchange for adult knowledge.
Themes
Will had absolutely no idea what the people were doing then, and he doesn’t want to look again now. “Will, please,” Jim begs. Will refuses, and Jim calls him a “darn old dimwit Episcopal Baptist” and goes running down the street, towards the house with the “stage.” Will turns and walks “quickly” home.
The fact that Will wants to avoid the house and Jim wants to spy again underscores the boys’ differences. Will is “good” and acts accordingly, but Jim is more easily tempted by things considered sinful.
Themes
