The Importance Of Atmosphere In Ray Bradbury's '

In this passage, Ray Bradbury generates a mood of tension and extreme pressure that exists in stark contrast to the happy and carefree attitude that permeates the majority of the novel.

During the beginning paragraph, Bradbury compares aspects of the summer night to natural disasters, characterizing the heat that overwhelms the environment as uncontrollable and sinister. In the opening sentence, wind is personified as the creator of “dust ghosts” that haunt the sidewalks, suggesting that it is the natural elements that have the power to create turmoil. The tree is also personified and is said to incite “avalanches of dust.” Similarly, a volcano is described as “showering red-hot ashes everywhere.” The houses, on the other hand, are illustrated

in a metaphor as “smoldering with spontaneous combustion.” Nature and its actions are unknown, or “spontaneous,” therefore, they are dominant. All of these instances portray nature as having authority over what occurs and bearing a strength unmatched by humans. Comparing heat to something as unpredictable and destructive as a natural disaster adds a new aspect of danger to the hot day.
In the second paragraph of the excerpt, the use of mechanical and metal imagery alludes to the idea of machines being harmful. The alliteration calls special attention to color descriptions: “red bricks” turn “brass and gold” and “roof tops [are] paved with bronze.” In a metaphor, the “high-tension wires” above the houses are “lightning held forever.” In these two sentences, the metallic appearance of the neighborhood and the mechanical wires are characterized as extremely perilous. The wires are connected with a natural element, lightning, and then immediately afterwards deemed a “threat.” Not only are the machines assumed to be malevolent, but they are connected with nature, thus again portraying nature as a hazard.
Parallel structure and cadence are used within the text to add to the theme of nature and its cycles. Catalogues utilizing parallel structure, such as the one describing the “dust ghosts,” lead the reader to believe that the heat is practically never ending, similar to how the sentences stretch on. The cadence in these same sentences creates a rhythm when reading that mimics the rhythms of nature and the seasons. The cicadas sing “louder and yet louder,” creating a never ending cycle that consistently intensifies just as the heat does.
As the selection continues, tension builds as the climate becomes hotter and hotter.

Bradbury describes the heat in an effort to make it sound not only uncomfortable but unbearable. Metaphors and similes depict the lake as “a quantity of steam” and the air as “hot spring waters.” Words such as “baking” and “furnace” add to the illusion that the streets of Douglas’s neighborhood are literally being cooked and turned to liquid. Even the sun is at the mercy of the heat, and has “overflowed” instead of rising. All of these elements work together to form the image of a scorching hot day that builds tension for the reader. Near the end of the passage, the heat outside is brought inside to Douglas, who is a “bubbled mass of perspiration.” The usage of the word “bubbled” to describe Douglas and later the word “melted” connects Douglas to the earlier image of the streets practically boiling. The explanation of the intolerable heat and Douglas’s relation to it adds meaning to Douglas’s struggle with the concept of death and the pressure he feels upon himself. Just as the heat is destructive, the reality of death and the fact that everything has “changed” is devastating to Douglas. He has “melted” in the heat just as he has collapsed under the weight of

adulthood.
Through the depiction of an insufferably hot summer’s day, Bradbury incites feelings of stress and expectations of crisis in the reader. This scene contrasts with the normally joyful and comfortable descriptions of summer weather within the rest of the novel.