“Uncle Einar ” can almost be considered comic relief after one has experienced many of the dark stories of horror and the grotesque contained in The October Country. This story is a fantasy about a man whose green wings make him quite bizarre. Yet Bradbury leaves his readers warmly smiling after having read a “they lived happily ever after” ending.

In spite of its happy ending, however, Bradbury also treats themes of loneliness and isolation. Uncle Einar has always been divided from the normal world because of his wonderful wings. When he suffers the loss of some of his supernatural powers, he becomes despondent and useless except for the degrading task of drying wet laundry. He is indeed a man alone. Only after Uncle Einar’s children ask him for a kite does his loneliness disappear. As the children’s wonderful green kite, he finds his full potential tapped again. He finds a useful, thrilling, dignified task for himself, and his loneliness vanishes.

Bradbury’s style of writing should also be noted here. His images and metaphors provide an added intensity to his writings, allowing his readers more readily a firsthand experience as they read. Uncle Einar’s flight over “moon-dreaming country hills” while he watches “a faint bandage of dawn appear” and, later, the description of Einar and his despondency as being like a “sun-parasol, green and discarded” are examples of Bradbury’s blending of poetry and prose, a technique that will grow and flourish in his later works.