There will come soft rains Essay

Language exam: ‘there will come soft rains’
Good morning Miss Wiebke, Miss _____, My English exam topic is about a short fictional story called ‘There will come soft rains’ written by science fiction author Ray Bradbury, in which the main idea revolves around a futuristic house that can cook, clean, speak, etc. Due to a nuclear war, the inhabitants of the home have disappeared; only their silhouettes are left, printed into outer walls. The house, unaware of their deaths, continues to serve the absent people. The story covers topics such as technology, our future, humanity and nature and that’s what this essay is about.
My statement is: Nowadays we all appreciate and applaud technology, we use it every day, but technology is a double edged sword and, in the right circumstances, it could mean the end of humanity.
The story was written in the Cold War Era in which people were concerned about the devastating effects of atomic bombs and nuclear weapons. The world was still recovering from the effects of World War II and the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan. At first technology was created to improve our society, and make our environment a better and safer place. (Such as traffic lights, operating tools etc.) But now were misusing and taking advantage of it, and to be honest it’s kind of sad, we are humans after all, I’m sure we can use our hands to do many things we have technology do for us now. Making use of technology to create weapons to destroy the society we built all over the years is making an abuse of technology and also an irony.
In the story the house makes everything for the inhabitants, from cooking to cleaning, it talks about how perfect this system and life style is, how technology took a step further and gave humans this new help, it did every little task for them, like it says, “An aluminum edge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled it down the throat which digested and flushed them away into the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.” The whole house worked to please humans, but even when there weren’t any humans left to serve it still worked.
And as I said before it’s ironic because the dog that was starving next door died from starvation when the kitchen had plenty of food.
“Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich odder and sent of maple syrup”. The only thing that was stopping the dog to enter the kitchen and eat the food was a door, which he couldn’t open. And here we have the Nature aspect of the story.

From the beginning of the story we see the house isn’t too fond on nature, cleaning every single leaf that felled on the porch, scaring away the birds near the windows and most important the dog I talked about before, the dog itself symbolized nature, which was inside technology, and since the dog wasn’t part of the family directly the house didn’t need to serve him, so it left him to die, then sent out swarms of the mice and rats to clean it up. So the house did know and sensed there was some kind of living thing inside, but since it wasn’t human, he didn’t care. Technology wasn’t fond of Nature and neither was Nature.
This shows how the same technology that is supposed to help us ends up killing us, (not only humans but any living thing) like the fact that human population completely disappeared because of an atomic bomb. We created with our own intelligence something we couldn’t control and it ended with our own lives. Is Technology helpful now? How can Technology be useful without us?
We get an idea from the story what our future would be if we keep abusing of technology, the house even though there was no one to serve, continued working, and later on began functioning on a bad way, it was acting crazy and in the end, a simple and original element destroyed the intelligent house. That element belonged to Nature, it was fire. With this, Bradbury is trying to tell us to stop and think about the after cause and consequences before we use or invent technology and nature, even though lacks man's intelligence, endures long after mankind has been wiped out.
As my own experience I can talk about how technology can be helpful, I see it every day, it’s easier to talk to people from around the world, to communicate with others, to inform yourself, it makes difficult tasks such as carrying heavy weight or building easier, but I also see abusing of technology, creating a machine for every single thing we can do on our own is an abuse, and also last year we studied the Second World War and the Cold War and I know how much the atomic bombs affected not only the people and cities in Japan, but everyone around the world were afraid of the effects this advanced weapons produced.
My Technical conclusion is that Bradbury used really well personification, Irony and symbolism, because the house acted like a human, as I said before, cooking cleaning etc. and we could imagine and realize the dog and the fire were representing nature, and the dog’s death is ironic, and the house’s destruction too. With these elements, the story has a deeper meaning and succeeds in indirectly warn us about the future and the dangers of technology.
My Personal conclusion is that yes, technology is helpful, but there’s a limit. We should use it for certain things, I don’t think we really need an electric can opener, peeler, and such more, we can use our hands to do a lot of things, instead of having technology doing us that. I also think we should be careful, because there are still some aspects we don’t know about technology, and it can overcome us.