There Will Come Soft Rains Final Draft
Faith Janicki
Writ 102
16 February 2015
The Fall of the House of Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” includes many different literary elements to depict August fifth of 2026 and quite literally gives life to a home that continues to care for a family that no longer lives there. Putting to use some of the same strategies directors of horror movies use today, Bradbury creates a haunting cautionary tale about the power of technology.
Bradbury makes very strategic use of a nursery rhyme structure for the voices of the house. A voice chants, “Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one,” and “Nine-fifteen, time to clean!” (Bradbury 399). Working in the same way that many horror movies do today, the structure makes the reader uncomfortable by combining a child-like mentality with something much darker. Later on, a dog, “once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores,” (Bradbury 400) enters the house searching for the family. The dog is unable to locate them and begins frothing at the mouth once it smells food and eventually dying. Mechanical mice quickly relocate the dog to the incinerator. The scene is intensely tragic. This use of tragedy to put a story in perspective is another tactic put to use by both horror movie directors and Bradbury himself.
Sara Teasdale’s poem plays an important role in a theme for the short story; life will go on even after man is gone. Bradbury uses it as a form of foreshadowing and to illustrate a detachment from nature within the family that resided in the home at one point. Chosen at random in the absence of Mrs. McClellan, the poem includes lines such as “And not one will know of the war, not one will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn would scarcely know that we were gone” (Bradbury 401). The story parallels with this poem perfectly as man has
Writ 102
16 February 2015
The Fall of the House of Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” includes many different literary elements to depict August fifth of 2026 and quite literally gives life to a home that continues to care for a family that no longer lives there. Putting to use some of the same strategies directors of horror movies use today, Bradbury creates a haunting cautionary tale about the power of technology.
Bradbury makes very strategic use of a nursery rhyme structure for the voices of the house. A voice chants, “Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one,” and “Nine-fifteen, time to clean!” (Bradbury 399). Working in the same way that many horror movies do today, the structure makes the reader uncomfortable by combining a child-like mentality with something much darker. Later on, a dog, “once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores,” (Bradbury 400) enters the house searching for the family. The dog is unable to locate them and begins frothing at the mouth once it smells food and eventually dying. Mechanical mice quickly relocate the dog to the incinerator. The scene is intensely tragic. This use of tragedy to put a story in perspective is another tactic put to use by both horror movie directors and Bradbury himself.
Sara Teasdale’s poem plays an important role in a theme for the short story; life will go on even after man is gone. Bradbury uses it as a form of foreshadowing and to illustrate a detachment from nature within the family that resided in the home at one point. Chosen at random in the absence of Mrs. McClellan, the poem includes lines such as “And not one will know of the war, not one will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn would scarcely know that we were gone” (Bradbury 401). The story parallels with this poem perfectly as man has