Personification In There Will Come Soft Rain

In his intriguing story There Will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury portrays a dystopian future wherein all of humanity has been destroyed and all that remains is their creations, more specifically the technology they’ve created. By portraying this haunting image of a world decimated by simple human nature, Bradbury illustrates the idea that we, as a species, cannot resist our nature to expand beyond current limits and to explore unchartered territory, and in doing so, will have reached and will continue to reach places, literal and figurative, that we never should have visited or even had been willing to visit. The inevitable result is our demise.

Ray Bradbury’s consistent use of personification is also shown with things within the character’s home. Certain statements about the stove are a great example, such as the phrase, “the stove hummed…” This is a fair example because stoves do not hum like a human would. Sure, they can make low, constant noises, but not hum a tune.

Albert Einstein once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” During the 1950s one of the most powerful inventions, the nuclear bomb, was on everybody's mind. An author called Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction texts and he wanted to show how people could died of nuclear destruction because of that nuclear forces it has caused problems in our society. In the story, “There will come soft rains” by Ray Bradbury, there is a house that started to burn down with the city. Therefore, technology has harmed society because society thinks that their inventions can protect them but it ends up harming humanity.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the author reminds the reader how the technology advancement can be wondrous yet dangerous. He shows the world in the 2026, how it’s going to go on without the life of humans. As technology has been misused, it became the ultimate destruction of humans. People depended too much on technology and had faith to it.

Technology is a helpful tool that society has become accustomed to using. However, the overuse of technology can lead to disaster. In “The Veldt” and “There Will Come Soft Rains”, Ray Bradbury explores the power that technology holds through the use of futuristic gadgets. Both stories contain smart homes that provide everything for the humans living in the house and show the destruction caused by it. Through these technological advancements, the reader sees how mankind is being defeated by its own creation in mental and physical ways. Bradbury uses the superior technology of the smart home, the replacement of humans for the newest electronics, and the dependence of technology on humans to explain that overindulgence of these modern appliances can have drastic results.

In “There Will Come Soft Rains” Ray Bradbury suggests that technology is very destructive and dehumanizing. Bradbury shows this through talking about a house in the year 2026 that does everything for the humans that live in it. The house makes their food, cleans the dishes, cleans the house, and even reads to them. To some people this may sound like a good thing, but Bradburry shows how the house is not a human and it just is not the same. These are things people are meant to do and can have some meaning. Having a house doing nearly everything for you truly is dehumanizing. When he describes the houses jobs he makes them sound useless. The movements are useless because there are no people in the house, due to what Bradbury suggests was an atomic bomb by writing that the house was the only one not destroyed in a whole city, and there was a green radioactive glow throughout the city. Another way bradbury showed the house was destructive was when

The seven rooms in the house also conveyed stages in life ending with death. These rooms were set up from east to west. This meaning that the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west, and death comes in the darkness. "In this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet--a deep blood color." The guest's avoided this room because it was a sign of death.

Technology today has advanced and impacted our way of living and the dependence on it has become a natural habit for our society. People today depend on their phones for numerous things such as, talking, messaging, driving directions, surfing the web or even to update their current Facebook status. Many people say that since they rely so heavily on technology, it has been known to weaken our society’s ability to open a book or newspaper to find information instead of looking at your phone. Technology has become a crutch for our generation today and without it we would fail. There have been inferences that technology will ruin us and lead us to extinction. In Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, he purveys speculation that technology is the cause of downfall in society and that nature will outlast man’s creation.

Personification, according to the Webster’s Dictionary, is defined as, “representation of a thing or abstraction as a person or by the human form,” which means that the author gives a non-human object a human trait. An example of personification is found in lines 77-78. Bradbury wrote, “No, not eyes - brass buttons that watched the boy.” In this example, the author gives the brass buttons the human trait to watch the boy. This gives us the idea that he has lots of buttons on his jacket which identifies him as the general. The impact of personification on the reader is that it makes the reader connect the eyes to the buttons in the story. It would have much less impact if, “the jacket had many buttons” were written instead. Along with alliteration, Bradbury used simile to positively impact his

Imagine if a person could actually prophesize the future. Try to imagine what the future will hold as individuals, artificial intelligence, and world peace. Ray Bradbury was a poet and writer of idealistic futuristic scenarios and horror. Although he did not want to be classified as a Science Fiction writer, he was exactly that in the eyes of his readers and critics. Ray Bradbury wrote two short stories composed of his ideals of the future: “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “All Summer in a Day. “ Both of these two short stories show a futuristic outlook on life for humans and humanity; although the concepts are expressed differently. “There Will Come Soft Rains” shows the fate of the human race and the end of humanity. Bradbury describes

People don’t appear to realize that technology doesn’t care about its owners, it will continue to live until they have long since expired. Similarly, a poem titled “Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale, the inspiration for Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, has a metaphor for technology in it. “Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly..” In this instance, the birds, trees, and all other aspects of nature are being referred to as the technology in the story; technology wouldn’t care if humans died off, it will just keep living and going through its automatic tasks.

In science fiction, technology is an omnipresent force in all stories. Whether robots are cleaning up after us like The Jetsons, or our robot overlords like The Terminator, or anywhere in between on that spectrum, technology can take on a variety of roles in different stories. Authors use technology in many ways to vastly different ends. In the two stories I have chosen to look at, The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne and There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradburry, technology is as important to the story as any of the main characters. In The Birthmark, technology is used to induce a sense of wonder from the reader, while in There Will Come Soft Rains, technology is used to convey a sense of dread. Although both stories use technology to different effects, both of these stories share one common trait with their portrayal of technology; in both instances, technology is presented with a sense of irony.

Personification is giving an inanimate object or person characteristics of a living thing. “The breeze played with his hair.” (Strasser 76) The author chose to use personification to show how the breeze played with his hair. The word played is the word that shows personification in this quote. In this section of the story, Shelby is talking to Gabriel, just outside her father’s studio. In addition, when things got uncomfortable, he puts his hands in his pockets, then, “the breeze played with his hair”. This uses the literary element of personification by the reason that the breeze is an inanimate object. When the breeze played with his hair, Strasser, gave the breeze a human characteristic of playing. Most importantly, the word playing is a characteristic of a living thing. Ordinarily, when combined together, you get the literary element of personification. Without the use of personification in this quote, the breeze would have had no way to show what it did to Gabriel’s hair. Therefore, the quote, “the breeze played with his hair,” is the literary element of personification.

The house is always being referred to as alive, and throughout the story different parts of the house are being talked about as though they are body parts of a human. "Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior," just as a disease or an illness would overcome a human body (Poe 716). They say the house has eye-like windows and are of a crimson red. The house is connected to the family and the family name, because this family is the only family to have ever lived in this house, and the house has `seen' everything that has gone on with the family from the very beginning. As long as the house stays up and strong the family name will remain and continue, but if the house were to crumble the family members in it would die with the house. Because the house is almost like their hearts, and as long as it's alive and well they will stay alive and well, and the family name will be carried on.

An example of personification in this short story is, “He kept his head to one side to escape the strangling fumes.” This quote explains to us how the fumes from the matches are affecting the man, and this extra detail helps add to the vivid style. In “Love of Life”, London uses personification to describe the hunger pangs; “They gnawed and gnawed until he could not keep his mind steady…” As many of us have never felt true hunger, this description is necessary to create a clear and vivid style. London describes the man getting up by using the simile, “his joints were like rusty hinges.” This simile, along with the entire paragraph, really demonstrates London’s vivid style because it is very descriptive and shows us how weak the man is becoming. This figurative language helps create London’s vivid style.