John Carter’s ten years on Barsoom

John Carter’s ten years on Barsoom form the decisive middle of his life story: a decade in which a stranded Earthman learns to survive among its peoples, falls in love with Dejah Thoris, and becomes entangled in the struggles shaping the planet’s future. The span is not presented as a simple record of adventures. Carter recounts it from Earth, where its first ten years have become both the life he fought for and the past he must now remember.

Identity and narrative frame

Carter introduces the decade as part of a memoir written under the pressure of his conviction that he is mortal. He cannot explain the strange events that befell him, but says that his dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave for ten years. He presents his account as the testimony of an ordinary soldier of fortune, not as a theory, and hopes that knowledge gained on Mars may help readers understand the planet.

The distance between the lived decade and the act of telling it gives the period two endings. In the remembered story, Carter’s life on Barsoom is a sequence of immediate dangers and commitments; in the framing narrative, those years have already passed, and he writes from a small study overlooking the Hudson. He says that twenty years have intervened since the night he first understood his love for Dejah Thoris: ten years were spent living and fighting for her and her people, and ten more have been lived upon her memory.

Learning Barsoom and its dangers

Carter’s first encounters with the green Martian warriors establish that survival depends on reading unfamiliar bodies, weapons, and customs. His unexpected agility changes the warriors’ response to him: those who had wanted to destroy him instead regard him as a remarkable discovery to capture and display. The pause gives him time to study them and to recognize why escape on foot is no safe plan. Their rifles are light, hard-wearing weapons firing explosive radium projectiles; their effective range in actual service, with wireless finders and sights, exceeds two hundred miles.

Captivity also reveals a culture whose idea of amusement sharply opposes Carter’s own. The warriors examine his muscles and skin, then insist on seeing him perform. Because he has not learned to walk in Barsoom’s weaker gravity, he skips and flits among furniture, bruises himself, and falls back to crawling; his repeated misfortunes provoke their laughter. Carter comes to understand that this response is not merely amusement at an awkward stranger: among the green men, a prisoner’s death agonies can provoke wild hilarity, and killing prisoners through ingenious torments is a common entertainment. The decade’s encounters with Barsoom therefore bring both practical adaptation and a sustained confrontation with a social order he finds brutal.

Love and political possibility

Carter’s attachment to Dejah Thoris becomes the emotional center of the decade. He describes falling in love despite a lifetime of travel, earlier opportunities, and his search for an ideal woman. Their differences remain unmistakable: she is from another world, has been hatched from an egg, may live for a thousand years, and belongs to a people whose customs and standards differ from his own. Yet Carter’s later recollection does not diminish his conviction that she embodies everything virtuous, beautiful, noble, and good. The memory of that conviction is tied to a precise scene: he sits on silks in an old chamber at Korad while the nearer moon crosses the western sky and lights its gold, marble, and jeweled mosaics.

Dejah Thoris also gives voice to a political alternative to the green Martians’ inherited way of life. As a prisoner, she explains that her expedition from Helium was a peaceful scientific mission sent to rechart air currents and measure atmospheric density. She argues that the work served both peoples: without the scientific operations maintaining the planet’s air and water, she says, Mars could not support human life. Her appeal condemns a society without written language, art, homes, or love, in which women and children are held in common, and urges cooperation with the red Martians to help regenerate a dying planet.

The appeal briefly unsettles the assembly. Lorquas Ptomel and the warriors listen in silence; Carter believes they are moved, and sees Tars Tarkas rise with an expression of inward conflict and momentary kindness. The scene makes political change imaginable, but also shows how deeply custom and inheritance constrain it. For Carter, the decade’s stakes thus extend beyond personal escape or romance: the possibility of fellowship between peoples stands against entrenched violence and a threatened environment.

Service, war, and the scale of the decade

Carter’s route through Barsoom requires practical accommodation as well as combat. After recounting his experiences to the Ptor brothers, he follows their advice to seek employment in Zodanga, where trust and favor are most readily earned through military service. They provide him with a small domestic bull thoat for riding. To pass as a red Martian, he anoints his body with reddish oil, has his long hair cut in the prevailing style, and adopts the metalwork and ornaments of a Zodangan gentleman attached to the house of Ptor. The disguise is a concrete stage in his adaptation: he does not merely observe Barsoom’s divisions but learns how to move within them.

The scale of his involvement grows into a campaign against Zodanga. Three days after the force begins marching, Carter rides beside Tars Tarkas with Woola trotting behind his mount. The army travels only by night, sheltering by day in deserted cities and keeping even its beasts indoors. Tars Tarkas recruits another fifty thousand warriors on the march; ten days after departure, the force halts at midnight outside Zodanga, one hundred and fifty thousand strong. Its numbers and the coalition’s tensions matter together: Carter is told that the green warriors’ fighting strength equals ten times their number in red men, while Tars Tarkas must somehow hold a host of rival groups together long enough to reach the city. Their feuds recede as hostility toward the red men—and especially the Zodangans’ campaign against green Martians and their incubators—takes precedence.

Change, memory, and significance

Carter’s retrospective account binds physical survival, love, and political allegiance into one measure of the ten years. He does not remember Barsoom only as the place where he learned to fight; he says that he lived and fought for Dejah Thoris and her people. At the same time, the world he describes is not idealized: its shared scientific work sustains life, while its communal customs, cruelty to captives, and intergroup hatred obstruct the fellowship that might help preserve it.

The decade’s significance is sharpened by the contrast between action and remembrance. On Barsoom, Carter’s knowledge is repeatedly provisional: he studies armed captors, adapts his appearance, and enters a vast military undertaking whose unity is fragile. From Earth, he can give those experiences a shape and name their enduring personal consequence. The ten years are both a chapter of a larger planetary conflict and the portion of his life that remains most alive in memory, even after another ten years have passed without Dejah Thoris.