The importance of speech in our world and Rye's can't be over exaggerated. Spoken language has become so deep-rooted in our society that few would be able to survive without it. It helps us understand one another to where we can share the past and present to develop ideas about numerous things for the future. As seen in the story without this understanding people will go back inhumane and ordinary lifestyles. Rye explains that "children would run through the downtown canyons with no real memory of what the buildings had been or even how they had come to be, today’s children gathered books as well as wood to be burned as fuel." These children "ran through streets like chimpanzees, they had no future." All of this chaos caused by a lost of nature that we are accustomed to using everyday.
Butler shows in this story the importance of speech and how it can have a detrimental affect on society. It shows feminism, Rye is the only female that can speak. This gives her a sense of power that females today do not have. This pandemic can destroy a whole population and greatly impact how people go about lives. Being able to have a voice as a certain gender and as a person in general would significantly impact the way society