The Veldt

"The Veldt" uses foreshadowing as a key plot element. This is apparent from the first lines of the story, where Lydia thinks there is something the matter with the nursery room and asks her husband...

Personification is a literary device in which a thing, animal, or inanimate object is given human attributes in order to add an aesthetic quality to the narrative and contribute to the author's...

Personification is assigning human traits to an inanimate object or an animal. In this story, the Hadleys' Happylife home is described and treated as if it is a person. For example, from the first...

Conflict can take two basic forms. External conflict is what we see when a character struggles against an outside force, person, or group of people. Internal conflict is a psychological struggle --...

The primary message of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" concerns the dangers of overreliance on technology. Bradbury presents a cautionary tale of how technology can completely consume a...

The setting of “The Veldt” is the Hadley’s home, although this is not a family home as we would recognize it today. Their futuristic home is controlled by automated, state-of-the-art technology...

A simile is a comparison of two unalike things in which the word like or as is used. When Wendy and Peter arrive at home from the carnival they'd been visiting, the narrator says that they were...

The main message of "The Veldt" concerns the dangers of becoming too reliant on technology and the consequences attached to not disciplining children. George and Lydia Hadley purchase an expensive,...

In a way, one could argue that George and Lydia killed themselves, indirectly of course. Yes, the lions kill them, and yes those lions were created by the couple's children, but those children were...

A literary allusion within "The Veldt" to the story Peter Pan would allude to one or more of several things. Peter Pan was a playful rascal who never wanted to grow up. Peter Pan had a following...

One definition of symbols is that they are anything which is given a meaning that is different from its literal one. As such, almost anything could be a symbol, but typically the application of...

The climax of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" is George and Lydia's death in the simulated African veldt within the nursery. However, before they are trapped and killed by the machinations within the...

A theme statement encompasses a work of literature's primary theme and forms a discussion regarding the author's main message of the narrative. In Ray Bradbury's celebrated short story "The Veldt,"...

The irony in "The Veldt" is that the family has automated factors added to their house in order to simplify and ease their lives so that they have more time to spend with each other. However,...

The Hadley family, in the Ray Bradbury short story "The Veldt," lives in a "Happylife Home," which they say they bought so that they wouldn't have to do anything anymore. This home provides for all...

As he talks to Lydia about the supposed neuroses of their children, George observes: Who was it said, "Children are carpets, they should be stepped onoccasionally"? We’ve never lifted a hand....

In Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," there are many examples of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a literary device that authors use to give hints to upcoming events in the story. The first...

I would want to argue that there are actually two levels of conflict that occur in this excellent story. There is of course the overt external conflict that occurs between George and Lydia and...

The first point that Ray Bradbury makes in this sentence is that Peter and Wendy have very little interest in family life with their parents. It is easy for them to decide at the last minute to...

It is clear that Bradbury presents us with a world in which technology has actually become more important to the children than their parents. When David McClean is called in to give his expert...

In Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," George and Lydia Hadley purchase an expensive Happylife Home, which is a completely automated smart home that performs virtually every necessary function...

On one level, the mood of "The Veldt" is clearly one of fear and paranoia. We can sense this from the very first lines of the story: "George, I wish you'd look at the nursery." "What's wrong with...

George and Lydia do not discipline their children very well. After being frightened by the lions, Lydia asks George to lock up the nursery for a few days until she settles down. George protests,...

Bradbury seems to conceive of children as very intelligent, capable, and potentially manipulative creatures. Wendy and Peter Hadley, the children of George and Lydia Hadley, have manipulated the...

It seems evident that Mr. and Mrs. Hadley were eaten by the lions from the veldt scene that plays on the walls of the nursery. This is foreshadowed by such events as Mr. McClean finding Mrs....

"The Veldt" has two settings: the Happylife Home where the Hadley family lives, and within that, the nursery with its viewscreens that are almost always set to an African veldt. The significance of...

The Hadley children are named after Wendy Darling and Peter Pan, children who live, for some time, quite happily and freely without parents. Peter Pan, especially, never wants to grow up, and Wendy...

The Hadley parents can be described as "good people" who mean well but are simply misguided. They believe that buying a Happylife Home will improve their family's standard of living. As parents,...

The nursery in "The Veldt" is a very large room that displays interactive, immersive computer simulations that respond to and reflect the thoughts of the participants. In short, it is like an...

The definitions for nursery and playroom and the context of the story make it clear why Bradbury used the term instead of calling it a playroom. The Oxford English dictionary defines a nursery as...

As others have noted, the names Peter and Wendy Hadley in Bradbury's 1950 story are inspired by J.M. Barrie's 1904 Peter Pan. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy Darling are a bit different than...

The basic reason behind Wendy and Peter wanting to get rid of their parents is that, being children, Wendy and Peter have already been given an unnecessarily significant amount of freedom. Once...

Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" is narrated in the third-person limited, where the audience can only know the thoughts and feelings of one character. Unlike third-person omniscient...

When George Hadley says that "Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally," he is communicating that he blames his children for the fear he feels surrounding the strange behavior...

In "The Veldt," Bradbury portrays the Hadley's as bad parents in the following ways. Firstly, their purchase of the Happylife Home nursery suggests that they are bad parents because they buy it so...

"The Veldt" is a story about a family living in a technologically advanced world in which the children "don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell," because, as Peter asks, "what else...

"The Veldt" is a parental horror story that ends, ironically, in horror dealt to the parents (ironically, because they are horrified by what they witness in the nursery not knowing that the nursery...

David McClean is the psychologist that George and Lydia Hadley invite to look at their nursery. He thinks that George and Lydia have spoiled their children "more than most." He also says that they...

George and Lydia Hadley, the parents in Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," have abdicated their role as parents to their two children, Peter and Wendy. They are able to do this because their...

Most of the technological innovations in "The Veldt" sound great at first. But once you realize that they're replacing human relationships and actually reducing adults to the level of helpless...

The relationship between the Hadley children and their parents, or the lack of it, is a core element of this story. The children's lack of emotional maturity, resulting in a stunted relationship...

The Happylife Home System apologizes to George Hadley when it forgets to put ketchup on the dinner table: "'Sorry,' said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared." At first, the home...

It's easy to do the math on the Happylife Home system and determine it would cost about $270,000 in today's money. This shows that housing prices have inflated beyond the average inflation since...

Towards the beginning of the story, while Peter and Wendy are enjoying a helicopter trip, Lydia laments about the nursery and tells her husband that she is afraid of the African veldt, which the...

In Ray Bradbury' story "The Veldt" the Hadley family purchase an automated home that does every human activity most people do, from cleaning, to cooking, to even tying shoes! Keep in mind that...

To guess what happened to the parents, we need to go back a few lines, to the period before David McClean arrives. At that point, we learn the following about the parents, who are trapped in the...

Evidently the parents named the children Wendy and Peter Pan because they wanted them to be free and happy and to indulge their fantasies like their fictional prototypes. The girl named Wendy and...

One of Bradbury's strengths as a writer is his ability to use images to convey a mood while also setting a scene. Some examples of sensory details in the story are as follows: We get a visual sense...

To answer your question, one needs to consider its context. The story imagines a futuristic world in which machines have been designed to meet humans' every whim and need. In this story, the family...

Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt" has a few unsettling morals around leaving children unsupervised and being overly reliant on technology. To craft your essay, think about these morals. Why is...