There Will Come Soft Rains is a short story that takes place after a nuclear war. In this story, it goes through the daily routine of a completely machine run house. The daily routine had been set for the family that lived there prior to the war. But, now the family no longer lives there, so the machines just keep running, with nothing to stop them. By The Waters of Babylon is also a short story that takes place after a nuclear war. The son of a priest goes on a journey to the east, which is forbidden. The place he travels to is called “The Place of The Gods.” He fears that this journey will kill him. Both stories take place post nuclear war. In There Will Come Soft Rains, it is told that the story takes place in the 2020 years. In By The Waters of Babylon, it is assumed to be around the 2020 years. But, a futuristic sense is given from both short stories. Destruction is a major similarity between the two. Everything but the machine run house is destroyed in There Will Come Soft Rains. The entire city of New York, which is considered the “Place of The Gods,” is left in ruins in By The Waters of Babylon. A common theme found in both stories is that technology can be very dangerous, and that …show more content…
technology will take over and destroy everything, if society isn’t careful. There Will Come Soft Rains has no characters, except for the house. The house is the only one left standing after the war. Because of the war, the family no longer exists. Nonetheless, the house still runs on its timed schedule.The house continues to cook breakfast, clean, and draw baths, for the family that no longer lives there. In the end, the house dies. A fire catches the house, and all the machines start losing control. They try to stop the fire in any way possible, but the house isn’t strong enough. The fire destroys the house completely, and the only thing that continues, is the repetition of that days’ date, said by the mechanical voice. By The Waters of Babylon has one main character. His name is John, and he is the son of a priest. In this short story, only the priests and their sons can touch the metal they find, which is most likely because it is radioactive. The place John travels to is actually New York City. The city is destroyed. Some skyscrapers were still standing, but he didn’t know what they are. Everything he sees, can be easily identified, but John can’t identify them. He can’t do that because they are all futuristic things he had never seen before. Elevators, sinks, and even subway stations were mentioned. Throughout John’s journey, he assumed that the “gods” were literal gods. But, in the end, John realizes that they were ordinary people, they had just died from the war. Max Beerbohm’s quote “All fantasy should have a solid base in reality” applies to both of these stories.
They are both futuristic stories, set after a war that never occured. The creation of the war gives the stories a feeling of what life would be like after a mass destruction. The house being run by machines is not something that is seen in today’s society. The closest thing to that would be the “Amazon Alexa” but that does nowhere near as much as the machines in this story. New York is one of the largest cities in the world. Imagining that city being destroyed is unimaginable, because of its size. Both stories have many fantasy elements, but they aren’t exactly noticeable. Most events are things that could possibly happen, but they have not. So, they’re considered
fantasy. The quote in relation to both short stories puts them in a new perspective. After analyzing both stories to pull out the fantasy elements, they are given a deeper meaning. The setting is a big portion of what makes them so unrealistic. This world has never experienced mass destruction or anything that would wipe out all of society. Seeing two different worlds, one with people and one without, gives a whole new meaning to how dangerous technology can actually be. The creation of nuclear bombs many years ago put everyone in a state of panic and fear. Both of these short stories were written in that time period, which could be the reasoning for the post war setting.
The futuristic story begins by familiarizing the reader with this house that can do pretty much anything a normal family would do, such as cook, clean, and read. Every hour a mechanical voice box stops to announce the date, weather, or event that is happening at that particular time. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is arranged chronologically, giving the effect that everything is in order, but the more you read the more you realize it’s not. At a point in the story, the mechanical voice box recites a poem by Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, about how even after human extinction the nature and animals will still remain unaffected. Even though the house is no longer occupied by anybody it still continues to carry out its day to day activities with
Review of A Hard Rain Fell: a G. I. ’s True Story of The War in Vietnam
In the chapter the “Rainy River” of the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien conveys a deep moral conflict between fleeing the war to go to Canada versus staying and fighting in a war that he does not support. O’Brien is an educated man, a full time law student at Harvard and a liberal person who sees war as a pointless activity for dimwitted, war hungry men. His status makes him naive to the fact that he will be drafted into the war and thus when he receives his draft notice, he is shocked. Furthermore, his anti-war sentiments are thoroughly projected, and he unravels into a moral dilemma between finding freedom in Canada or standing his ground and fighting. An image of a rainy river marking the border between Minnesota and Canada is representative of this chapter because it reflects O’Brien’s moral division between finding freedom in Canada or standing his ground and fighting in the Vietnam war.
Secondly, both stories use dialogue.... ... middle of paper ... ... Both stories use dialogue to give insight to the characters and why they behave in a certain manner.
..., because it shares a trait of totalitarianism in the modern day, when most expected things like this to only happen fifty to a hundred years ago. Thus the governments are similar in their ways of controlling their citizens in all three cases. Regardless of the dates that the two stories were published, events that the stories depict are still happening today.
In “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rain”, Bradbury described the world in August 4, 2026. The
Both stories show the characters inequality with their lives as women bound to a society that discriminates women. The two stories were composed in different time frames of the women’s rights movement; it reveals to the readers, that society was not quite there in the fair treatment towards the mothers, daughters, and wives of United States in either era. Inequality is the antagonist that both authors created for the characters. Those experiences might have helped that change in mankind to carve a path for true equality among men and women.
In both novels, the characters represent certain kinds of individuals in today's society. They encounterjealousy, as well as many other conflicts within themselves, and human nature. Ultimately, these two novels deliver the inner conflicts of our society.
Technology has grown in more ways than one, where it has reached the point of
Though the two stories are very different in how they deal with the issues of society, the symbols of houses present a very similar meaning to both stories. Both relate to a flawed society, however one acts as a barrier and another as an agent for change.
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
More importantly is that both these writings share how the common idea of industrialization can negatively impact the characters within each story, while relaying a relevant message to the readers themselves about their own society and its current nature; nevertheless, both these pieces go about demonstrating this completely opposite
Aside from the conditions, which lead to the creation of these works, they share a number of other common threads. Symbolism aside these works are very similar on the surface. Both are a collection of seemingly disjointed images, which when put together by the reader or observer serve up a strong social message. That messages being that the wars and conflicts of the times have twisted the world. This is reinforced by the contorted and misshapen images in both works.
In both pieces, the writers had a clear point they wanted to get across and used their styles to help convey their thoughts. They used facts and stories to help the reader see things from a different perspective, which allowed the reader to open up their mind to these topics. Both writers were very good at getting the reader to examine the topic from a fresh perspective and ultimately inform the reader to a new way of thinking. Whether they used facts and statistics or symbolisms and metaphors, both writers were able to get the reader to understand where they were coming from and assist the reader in finding the message in the text. By examining the similarities in writing we see that there is a common goal between the authors and now have a better understanding on why they chose the style they did and how it was
There always has to be differences and similarities between two stories in mood and tone of the story. There will come soft rains is a story about a time in the future where no one is there and the house is on its own. They end up getting the house on fire. The Landlady is about this guy who goes to this lady’s house to spend the night there is a lot of suspense in the story. It gets so dark that she kills him with poison and stuffs him.