What happened to the city and its people in "There Will Come Soft Rains"?
The story "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury takes its title from a poem by Sara Teasdale of the same title from her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow . Although Teasdale was writing about the horrors of trench and chemical warfare in World War I, the poem describes...
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the "soft rains" following a war that has ended human life. The house recites the poem in the story.
Ray Bradbury's story was first published on May 6, 1950 at the height of the Cold War and reflects anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. The automated house remains standing after the city and the people in it have been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. There are several details that make this obvious. First, no people come to eat the food the house prepares, or show up at any point in the story. The destruction of the city is described as follows:
The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
We also are told of silhouettes of the charred family incinerated by the nuclear blast on the outside of the house.
Which line in "There Will Come Soft Rains" describes what happened to the city?
Throughout the story "There Will Come Soft Rains," Ray Bradbury includes certain details that create a desolate, sad setting, including a description of what happens to Allendale, California after a nuclear strike. After beginning the story with a description of a mechanical house that is going on about its business despite no humans being present, the narrator pans out and shows the house from a third-person point of view:
"The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles."
After showing that the entire city is destroyed, the narrator zooms back onto the house, focusing on its outside where the shadows of the former occupants have been burned into the side.
Both images, the demolished city and the shadows of the home's deceased occupants, contribute to this story's larger ideas that the mechanical things we create are meaningless if we destroy ourselves.