The Rocket Man

1. What do Doug’s actions after his father gets home but before his parents
wake up actions tell you, the reader? That Doug is mischievous and curious.
2. What is the father’s favorite activity while at home? Why do you think that is?
Lounging and reading, he does it to relax.
3. Why does the mother save up chores like mowing the lawn for when the
father is home? Because the father being happy at work made the mother
happy.
4. When he first arrives home, Dad spends time doing mundane chores, like
gardening, and is described as pointedly not looking at the sky, but the sky is
“staring” at his back. What can we infer from this moment? He has had rough
times in space and is scared of it.
5. Why doesn’t Mother want Dad to look at the stars? Because it makes him
sad.
6. How is Doug’s father described physically throughout the story? Blank, not in
a good mindset nor manner.
7. What do you think Doug’s father truly wants? To have his wife notice him.
8. Doug’s father says to him, “[W]hen you’re out there you want to be here, and
when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that” (Bradbury, PDF p.
6). What could a possible theme (meaning) be for the story, based on this
quote and the ending of the story? A man who is torn between his family and
his job.
9. Near the end of the story, Mother says, “I thought, what if he dies on Venus,
then we’ll never he able to see Venus again. That if he dies on Mars, we’ll
never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in
and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune; on
those nights when those planets are high in the sky, we wouldn’t want to have
anything to do with the stars” (Bradbury, PDF p. 9). After you read the ending,
what is your response to this statement? She was right and she’ll never see
the stars the same way again.
10. In Ms. Watson’s opinion, the thing that makes Ray Bradbury such a great
writer is his use of imagery (sensory language). Go back through the story
and find an example that you find particularly successful, copy it here,
cite it with a page number try to copy the way I did it. One of my favorites
is: “His eyes were like gray crystal there, the moon in each one,” (Bradbury,
PDF p. 8). It indicates that Dad can only see his life in space no matter how
 much he wants to want his life with his family. I stood in the doorway in my
pajamas feeling the warm night wind.
11. Lastly, the major conflict in this story—the fact that Doug’s father wants to
want to stay home, but would really prefer to be out in space—could be
labeled as character vs. self.