Analysis Of 'The Pedestrian' By Ray Bradbury

In regards to his miserable depiction of the forthcoming society in his works, Ray Bradbury said that he "was not predicting the future, but was trying to prevent it” ("A Quote by Ray Bradbury"). Bradbury began to develop an opposition towards modernization owing to the burgeoning technological advancements of the early 1950s. He noticed how the world was beginning to hold focus on technology, such as new automobiles, innovative televisions, radios, and advanced weaponry. Bradbury’s writing soon focused on communities where technology was detrimental to the lives of the people by distracting them from their families, friends, and occupations. In towns where people are obsessed with technological ‘life-draining’ inventions and a city where intensely

As Leonard Mead is the only person walking through his neighborhood at night, he observes that “it [is] not unequal to walking through a graveyard”, and that “sudden gray phantoms [seem] to manifest upon inner room walls…or there [are] whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building [is] still open” (The Golden Apples of the Sun 9). Mead’s observations about how the neighborhood, befitting to a ghost town, is empty due to everyone being holed up in their houses, exhibit how people had become too attached to their devices to even take a walk outside. The diction used such as “graveyard”, “gray phantoms”, and “tomblike” exemplify how the people had become lifeless once they became slaves to their televisions and other technological possessions. Furthermore, losing interest in themselves and in the external world by solely staring at a screen all day caused people to disregard the society outside of their homes and only concentrate on the fake worlds inside their screens. As a former writer, Mead had lost his profession due to the fact that "magazines and books [do not] sell any more” and that “everything went on in the tomblike houses…ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them" (The Golden Apples of the Sun 11). In Mead’s society, people had forgotten all about literary works and only focused intently on their TV displays, unmoving and inattentive. The people, caught in a trancelike state, lost all feeling and could not even sense the light that was directly touching them. Therefore, the television had absorbed the feelings of all the individuals in Mead’s society, leaving him as the sole person who cared for people and nature enough