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There Will Come Soft Rains

by Ray Bradbury

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Student Question

How does Bradbury use hyperbole to compare our society with the story's futuristic dystopia?

Quick answer:

Bradbury uses hyperbole to compare our current society with the futuristic dystopia of the story by portraying the voice reading poetry in the fiery study as a kind of dystopic mockery, or ironic echo, of the panic humans might have felt if they hadn't been incinerated by an atomic blast.

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Bradbury is fond of the idea of the "automatic house," which is a kind of hyperbolic play on the mania for "labor-saving devices" in the home that started after World War II and continues to this day—there is another house like this in his story "The Veldt." In that story, the mechanical house supplants the parents, making their care of the children redundant. In this story, the automated house continues to "provide" for its owners long after they have been incinerated by an atomic blast. In both cases, there is a sense that, in taking the human labor out of the routine of living, life itself becomes dependent on, and reduced to, mechanical processes.

One example of hyperbole in the story occurs after the house catches fire, and the house goes into a kind of mechanical hysteria, as one by one its systems fail:

Ten more voices died....

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In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

The death throes of the house are a kind of dystopic mockery, or ironic echo, of the panic the actual humans might have felt, had they not been vaporized by the blast. In a future in which existence can be blotted out in an instant, only the machines are granted the "dignity" of such panic. This sentiment is best shown by the voice reading poetry in the fiery study. It's a common trope for people, when faced with certain destruction, to turn to art at the last moment as a final expression of humanity—think the string trio continuing to play on the sinking Titanic to the very last. Here, even this gesture is accidental and hollow, devoid of meaning, and, ultimately, feeling.

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