Technology – Ray Bradbury
Technology – Ray Bradbury
PLEASE READ AND REWORD WHAT YOU FIND OUT OF PLACE THIS WAS WRITTEN IT A QUICK MANNER
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 metaphor to keep everyone happy in a society and at your control all you need is food and entertainment. Since everyone is completely happy with this form of society Leonard Mead may have also been considered Insane for not conforming to the way everyone prefers to live there lives. This leads back to the point where the police car takes him away to the mental hospital for regressive tendencies. Regressive means returning back to an earlier or less advance point in time so when the police car says “To the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.” He is saying that Leonard Mead is being taken to be analyzed at Psychiatric Center for the fact that he is considered to be crazy because he refuses to keep up with the times. Technology has trapped and destroyed people’s lives by forcing them to conform to living like ants.
Another thing in this excerpt would be the Bradbury’s comparison of the movement of the scarab-beetles to the cars. The scarab-beetles are known best for rolling up animals dung into dung balls in order to plant there eggs and to find food too eat, they are scavengers. The cars in this story move as though there beetles, the beetles have an awkward walking style that resembles the way a car might move also it seemed to him that it was ceaseless or couldn’t stop. In comparison to the ant it seems the same as though it is a repetitive movement, the cars are trapped in a schedule do to the people being trapped.
Bradbury writes “Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows.”
In this excerpt from the pedestrian he is comparing the light from the firefly to the light coming from the television. As children catching fireflies was fun because of how they stuck out in the night; in the future the television is equal to that of the light of the firefly because like children, people of the future are captivated to the light of the television. He also compares the house to that of a graveyard, in saying this he saying that everything seems very dead to him with no lights on in the house but that of a faint glimmer, like that of a firefly in the house. The house is zombie like due to the fact that no one in the house has to think about anything, when watching television rarely do people think about what was seen. In this instance the society is stupefied by the television into being a zombie by submitting to stupefying entertainment instead of trying to becoming better more intelligent individuals by using the intellect that they were blessed with to better understand the world this has made