The Pedestrian Ray Bradbury Analysis

In the story “Pedestrian,” Ray Bradbury explores the idea that technology will overtake the creative mind unless a person continues to maintain his/her innate humanity. He sets the scene with a winter evening where Mr. Leonard Mead decides to take a walk, as he does every night while everyone else is watching television inside their houses. A police car (with no humans inside) finds Mead guilty of regressive tendencies—for walking—and arrests him. They drive past a lighted house, the only one with lights on in the whole city, of which Mead claims is his. The story opens with Mead taking his leisurely night walk. He whispers to each passing house, questioning what was on the television at the moment. And to no avail, no answer is reciprocated, as if the people are “sudden gray phantoms [that] seem to manifest themselves upon inner room walls [with] whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building [is] still open” (Bradbury 49).

In a way, the people can considered as dead, as they live inside the “tomblike building,” only capable of focusing on the technology ahead. With this, Bradbury implies that the society has driven itself to self-destruction by letting technology take over the mind, destroying birth of expression. As Mead continues his midnight stroll, a police car foremostly requests for Mead’s profession, to which Mead that he is a writer, and the car registers his answer as “no profession” (50). This curt response insinuates the degradation of print