‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’ Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: After the house burns down, one wall still stands, and, determined, it tells the date again and again.Īmong the ruins, one wall stood alone. Bradbury takes perfect advantage of this quality of the house. Yet the house goes on because the instructions are wired too firmly into its brain. The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here. No humans ever eat the meals or use the nursery or listen to the poems the house reads. The house tells time at constant intervals and uses it to perform certain actions, such as making breakfast. The house keeps a certain routine every day, no matter rain or shine, and time is a central part of this routine. Thematically, time plays, arguably, a more important part. In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! For example, at the beginning of the story, the house blurts out the time like an alarm, setting the scene for the story. Structurally, the time divides the story into manageable pieces, each showing a different window into the world Bradbury has painted. Time plays an integral part in “There Will Come Soft Rains,” both structurally and thematically.
All that it can do is repeat the date, again and again and again. The next day, only a wall of the house is left. The house tries its best to fight the fire, using all its water supply and fire-suppressing chemicals, but the fire wins out. That night, at 10, a falling tree bough breaks a window and knocks over a bottle of cleaning solvent, starting a fire. It conjures card tables, makes dinner, and reads an emotional poem to Mrs. The afternoon and suppertime roll by, and the house continues its routine.
The dog dies quickly, and the house cleans its corpse with an emotionless efficiency. Later, a dog, covered in tumors and sores, enters the house when the house recognizes it as the family dog. As the day goes on, the house goes along its daily routine with no one to tell it to stop, and eventually, we are clued in to the fact that the family has been vaporized, presumably by nuclear war. In “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ray Bradbury begins with a setting/character of a futuristic, semi-sentient house. Symbolism through setting, characterization, and personification Time as a structural and thematic device
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