All Summer In A Day

All Summer in a Day, by Ray Bradbury, is about the sadness of a girl. It portrays how it holds her back from enjoying life; causing her to stand out from her peers. On Venus, the sun only comes out once every seven years. This was a huge change for Margot, since she was born on Earth; none of the other children were.

Near the beginning of the short story, Bradbury tries to give readers a vivid description of how Margot would appear. He states, “[she] looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years,” then continued by comparing her to an old photograph that had been whitened away. The author also made sure to mention in Margot’s description that, if she was to speak, her voice would be ghostly. The way he chose to describe the girl clearly shows readers that she is not quite full of life. A reader could also compare how she was related to someone who had been lost in the rain to basically anyone who’d ever been lost. The feeling is most certainly not a pleasant one. When someone is lost, they’ll more than likely feel alone, sad, or maybe even scared. Margot was being characterized as a lonely, sad, quiet girl without having to literally state it.

However, another theme for the story could be, All Summer in a Day tells a narration of how jealousy can corrupt ones mindset.

That in turn, can lead to bad decisions made upon the rage of jealousy. Bradbury displays this when Margot’s classmates are quite rude to her. They yelled, “you’re lying, you don’t remember!” when she spoke about the sun in all of its glory. The children even robbed Margot of her opportunity to see the sun, by forcing her into a closet, “where they slammed and locked the door.” That alone shows how severe the children’s jealousy became and caused them to act excessively inappropriate towards Margot; all because she’d been born on Earth and had in fact remembered the

sun.
Nonetheless, sadness is one of the story’s main points. To further the idea of Margot’s depression, the author includes some of the girl’s actions. He explains that she would not participate “ [and] when the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved.” The fact that she withdrew from participating in anything that was happy or fun, shows that Margot very easily could have been depressed. Later, Bradbury writes about a time when the young girl refused to shower at the school. “[she] clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming [that] the water mustn’t touch [it].” Readers can gather that by adding this, it must imply how terrified and sad Margot was by being on Venus where it rained nonstop.
Margot’s actions, words, and looks in the story, prove that sadness and/or depression lay (not so hidden) behind them. All Summer in a Day was about the sadness trapped inside of a little girl, and Ray Bradbury exhibited that significantly.