The Importance Of Loss In Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine

791 Words2 Pages

Life’s Pushing Motion Loss is a big pushing motion of a person’s life. Loss is experienced by any type of person, whether they are young or old, mentally or physically disabled. It can be the loss of a family member or friend, or even moving away from everything that someone knew. Loss can hurt people, but it can help others move on from a life of pain. Loss can make a person depressed for a recently departed friend or relative. It can also free a person from a life of lies and sadness as they realize their true selves. The importance of loss in one’s life is clear in Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine. Through the eyes of every person in Green Town, and their interactions with each other over the summer of 1928, Bradbury shows how loss can Loss takes many joyful things out of each and every character’s life. The happiness machine nearly destroys Leo Auffmann’s relationship with his wife and kids. Leo helps quicken his loss of letting his wife go into the happiness machine. This only causes his wife to be depressed when she realizes that she will never go to the many places that the “Happiness Machine” shows her. Lena Auffmann even says, “It lies, that Sadness Machine!” (Bradbury 60). This is actually one very surprising instance of loss. It is very different from other losses in the book, since it is a machine that is built to make people happy that made Leo almost lose his family. Leo has to feel a loss by having the machine burn in order to understand how Lena During the last chapters, Doug finds himself choosing whether to look forward into the future or into the past. Doug’s final and most important loss is the end of summer. Doug realizes that summer ends with the dime stores selling school supplies a couple of weeks before the summer’s end. Doug evidently concludes that life can only get better and bigger as the summers pass. He states “Next year is going to be even bigger, days will be brighter, nights longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it all.” (Bradbury 236). The reader can infer that Doug has found what type of life he will choose. Loss can cause people to move forward in their lives; it can also cause pain and happiness in a person’s life. Everyone may be affected by loss in a positive or negative way. Through the people of Green Town in the novel Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury shows the reader just how deeply these characteristics of loss affect people. The interactions of the townspeople show that loss adds positive and negative influences to their lives, yet it also pushes them forward into the

Open Document