Human Extinction In Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rain

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In Ray Bradbury’s " There Will Come Soft Rains, " he fabricates a story with two themes about the end of the world. The first theme is that humans are so reliant on technology, that it leads the destruction of the world, and the second theme is that a world without humans would be peaceful, however no one would be able to enjoy it. Bradbury uses literary devices, such as narrative structure, personnification, and pathos to effectively address human extinction. One aspect which illustrates how he portrays human extinction can be identified as narrative structure, he structured the story in a way that it slowly abolishes the facade of technological improvements made by people to reveal the devastation that technology can cause. The story started …show more content…

Personifying the house allows the reader to view the world in the house’s perspective, establishing the petrification of the world. The fact that the house had no idea that the family perished, expresses that technology will do what it is programmed to do, but it does not have emotions, so it would be unaware of our absence. Bradbury compels the reader to feel despair, since he displays that the only living creature, the dog, was lonely and died. The reader can infer that the dog must have suffered for a long time, and feel compassion for what it must have been through, because “ The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores ” (Bradbury). The most heartbreaking scene with the dog was when it died, for the reason that it was treated like trash, “ The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire...Two o'clock, sang a voice. Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical

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