The mood in Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" is one of foreboding. From the opening, in which Mrs. Hadley asks her husband to look at the nursery and he asks what's "wrong" with it, we know that something is amiss in the Happylife Home. Sensory language heightens the reader's unease, especially in the nursery, where the children love to watch scenes of the African veldt. The parents hear screams when they observe the veldt, and Bradbury...
The mood in Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" is one of foreboding. From the opening, in which Mrs. Hadley asks her husband to look at the nursery and he asks what's "wrong" with it, we know that something is amiss in the Happylife Home. Sensory language heightens the reader's unease, especially in the nursery, where the children love to watch scenes of the African veldt. The parents hear screams when they observe the veldt, and Bradbury describes the veldt in rich but disturbing detail:
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths. The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes.
Given the parents' worries about their children and the effect the house is having on them, the sensory language around the house's caretaking qualities takes on a sinister cast. The house might be one that "clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep" but what if all this activity is doing more harm that good?
Bradbury's purpose is to alert people to the dangers of letting technology control their lives and particularly, to be alert to the ways technology can control the minds of impressionable children.
No comments:
Post a Comment