The Pedestrian
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The Pedestrian
Many People choose not to believe that there will ever be a time when society will stop reading completely; where television is extremely popular, and tends to overpower the enjoyment of sitting down with a good book. The setting in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” suggests a dark, apathetic, and technologically influenced future for our world.
In a world where the streets are completely deserted by 8 o’clock at night, something’s not right. This reality seems impossibly dark when compared to our lives right now, where people are roaming the streets at all hours of the night, creating havoc and just having fun. People now tend to enjoy a good brisk walk for some fresh air, and it seems obscure that the joy of that will ever fade.
This world in the story seems extremely apathetic because of the lack of concern for anything but entertainment. When there’s only one police car left, and it’s automated so that people don’t have to waste their time, that seems to be proving the world in this story to be quite careless. Having an automated police car is not logical, because a machine can’t be sympathetic, or really ever communicate with a human. This world that Ray Bradbury describes in his story is terribly detached and unsympathetic.
The reader can tell that something is going on, when a police car picks up Leonard Mead because he’s walking down the street at 8 o’clock at night. The police car is actually suspicious of this man just because he’s out for a walk, and walking seems to be so incredibly out of the norm. When people sit in their homes after work and watch television, and occasionally peer out their windows, it appears that there may be something else keeping them from being outside rather than their love of television.
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