Sunday 25 October 2015

What are some examples of imagery in the story "There Will Come Soft Rains"?

Imagery is description that uses the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. The imagery in Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Short Rains" first reveals the pointlessness and poignance of a technology that keeps working once all the humans it serves have been destroyed. For example, there is pathos in the sound imagery of the house addressing nobody:


 The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for...

Imagery is description that uses the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. The imagery in Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Short Rains" first reveals the pointlessness and poignance of a technology that keeps working once all the humans it serves have been destroyed. For example, there is pathos in the sound imagery of the house addressing nobody:



 The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…" 



Bradbury's poetic imagery personifies the house, making it seem like a human being. Here Bradbury uses sound imagery to personify the house's technology:



It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!



Below, Bradbury uses visual imagery to show a harsh and relentless technology trying to control nature:



For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows.



Ironically, technology, which is designed in this case to serve every need of the home's owners, is also what has destroyed the owners through a nuclear war. In the end, nature will win. Bradbury shows this in the following imagery of the house catching fire:



The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!



Bradbury continues to personify the house, and the following image, though primarily visual, also includes a sense of heat and motion:



The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.



Imagery at the end shows the destruction of the house:



Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.


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