Can't Stop Staring Into Bradbury's The Jar

An old-fashioned sideshow horror story is living rent free in my head now

I had come home late from a social event, and was buzzing from the excitement and the drink. I needed to chill, so grabbed a book off my library shelf. I grabbed my collection of Bradbury short stories, and flipped it open at random. I landed on The Jar, which I had not yet read. I loved it so much that the following morning I got up and read it again, to make sure it wasn’t just some late night trick of the mind. I was drawn back to The Jar (story), much the way the characters in the story are drawn to The Jar (physical object).

This is a “horror of the unknown” story. There is something inside The Jar, which the main character, Charlie, discovers at a circus sideshow. Something valuable, but it was hard to know just what. The thing inside seemed to be staring back with “white dead eyes”. The horror hit that haunts me still comes from the way it was seeing “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The repetition of the word gives the impression that it is see something, something, something.

What Charlie sees in The Jar is a chance to change his standing in the community, to right his own ship, which has been akilter due to his unloving and disrespectful wife. And the community does gather to stare into the Jar, turning Charlie’s home, to his wife’s chagrin, popular.

I love in a story when an object is seen by so many people as something different, and unique to them. They each see their own horrors in The Jar, and cannot look away.

The idea of something being ineffable, indescribable, is alluring to me. That while we can’t say what it is, we can begin to color in the space around it, describing certain aspects, or by contrast say the things that it is not. And with each of these words, we begin to find a way to talk about what we do not have words for.

Charlie doesn’t have the words to solve his marital problems. But The Jar changes him with his first touch of it — to him it is magical, even if what inside it may be nothing more than a circus hoax. Which also speaks to the other great power I love in the “unknowable horror” genre: any power it has, comes from our own minds. What we imagine it to be, it becomes. The more who believe in it, the more power it holds.

That is the bone chilling horror of humanity — the power of collective worship, which brings gods into existence, and unleashes their vengeance upon non-believers. Just as it befalls Charlie’s non-believer wife. 🙭