Use of Insect Images Thesis in The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury

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Recommended: Effects of technology on people's lives

Technology is becoming increasingly popular; we are forced to confront it everyday. Ray Bradbury has noticed this trend of people becoming more and more dependent on technology; after all we use the television, computers, and even automobiles everyday. In the pedestrian Ray Bradbury has used insect images in The Pedestrian that suggests that with the increasing number of people using technology it will trap and destroy us.

Bradbury writes "During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the gas stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions."

In this excerpt Bradbury has compared the rusting of cars to that of the rustling of insects. Rustling means to act or move with energy or speed and it also means to forage food. There are many cars in this future and an insect that there are a lot of, that do a lot of routine work and use a lot of energy would be the ant. They are trapped by there short duty filled lives and are looked on as insignificant; they are in essence zombies, Trapped and destroyed by the lifestyle that they are forced to except. This can be compared to Leonard Mead, he doesn't want to be a zombie like the rest of them he is like a lone red ant in a black ant hill and just as the red ant he doesn't fit in so he is outcast. Leonard Mead may have not been considered crazy in this society of the future, but he may have been considered a threat. He may have been killed to protect the fact that someone likes to enforce this to keep everyone stupid, Just as the red ant in the black ant hill would have been killed for trespassing on black ant turf. This instance is like the met...

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...ciety around him and forced to conform to what everyone else has come to consider a normal life and was destroyed by the technology.

Bradbury writes "The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest."

In this sentence Ray Bradbury has compared the light that Leonard Mead has encountered to a pin holding a specimen at a museum. Leonard Mead is stuck by the police like a lab specimen is stuck by a metal pin. He is trapped by this light and at this point he realized what the police have done, he realizes that he has been trapped.

Ray Bradbury's use of insect images has shown that through technology we will eventually be trapped and destroyed. Only by realizing what we love right now about our lives, such as nature can we stop from being trapped by the technology and have a more rich life for that of ourselves and that of those to come.

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