(see, for example, his short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”) and, as insidiously, the television. It is the latter technological development that is at the center of his 1951 short story “The Pedestrian,” a story influenced by his own experience of being questioned by police solely due to his decision to take a walk at a time when most were home watching television.

Bradbury’s real-life experience at being questioned by police because taking a late-night stroll appeared suspicious formed the basis of “The Pedestrian.” His protagonist, Leonard Mead, enjoys taking long walks in the evening. What makes this activity unusual is that, as readers discover, virtually every other individual in the city remains in their home watching television. Mead, consequently, exists as a statistical aberration and is considered a person of interest because of his failure to conform and to allow his life to be dominated by the images broadcast nightly on a television screen. When Bradbury uses phrases and passages like “cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard,” and “gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night,” he is referencing the social and intellectual deadening that has subsumed humanity as a result of the practice of filling free time with television viewing rather than other physically and mentally stimulating activities like walking outside and reading books. That is why his initial encounter with the police car includes the following exchange:

"Business or profession?"

"I guess you'd call me a writer."

"No profession," said the police car, as if talking to itself. The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.

"You might say that, " said Mr. Mead. He hadn't written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, 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.

"No profession," said the phonograph voice, hissing.

Mead, like Professor Faber in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, remains an avid consumer of the written word. Unlike the professor, whose passion for books exists outside the law, Mead simply enjoys the practice of reading and writing. To him, as to his creator, the intellectually and socially deadening influence of television has radically transformed the world in which he lives. Bradbury’s use of words and phrases that denote death and horror is a result of the author’s association of death in the physical sense with death in the context of a world without intellectual stimulation and physical activity.