Technology

As I have perused through interviews of Ray Bradbury online, I have learned a lot about his character and how he views the world. What captures my interest the most about Bradbury's views is how he feels about technology. To give some backdrop, Bradbury grew up during the 1920's and therefore was not suckling on technology at an early age like most people born at the end of the 20th century. He grew up surrounded by books and was not faced with the distractions of a computer. He describes his lifestyle during his youth in an article from the New York Times: "I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years" (nytimes.com). The era in which Bradbury grew up in allowed him to develop views on technology different from those of people of later generations. As an adolescent without the privilege of a computer, Bradbury spun out his stories from the keys of a typewriter. He lived through the invention of the computer and the cultural shift to its widespread use, but he chose to resist this shift and did not immerse himself in the progressing culture. Even today, as a man of 91 years old, Bradbury refuses to use a computer to type out his stories. He continues to use a typewriter. His earlier years as a man disconnected from technology shaped him into a grown man who would never become dependent upon it. His views on technology are very prevalent throughout his stories, notably in The Veldt and Fahrenheit 451, but also more subtly in many of his other works. Bradbury is very against technology and always has been. He sees the internet as a distraction and as unnecessary. I wish that I had the power that Bradbury posesses to enable myself to stay off of the computer because I spend countless hours of my life wasting away, staring at the computer screen, and I cannot escape it. I am highly appreciative of Bradbury's views.

The Veldt

This short story is filled with commentary on the progression of technology and how dangerous it is. The veldt is a short story about two parents and two children who live in a mechanical house. The house does everything for them. They don't even know how to cook an egg, because the house does that for them, too. The main part of the story is the nursery, a room that comes to life. The room belongs to the children. Anything that they imagine appears right before their eyes. There seems to be something wrong with the nursery. Everything seems too real, and it won't go away. The setting is Africa, and there are fierce lions roaming about. Every so often, screams can be heard through the doors. The children are very spoiled. As the story progresses, we learn that the children care more about the house and their nursery than they do about their own parents, and, when their father threatens to lock up the nursery and turn the house off forever, the children kill their own parents by locking them in the nursery to be eaten by the lions. This story is very deep and disturbing. It represents the power of technology and how it has begun to supersede humans in importance and power.

The Next in Line

The Next in Line is a short story from Bradbury's collection titled The October Country. It's almost 40 pages long. This story is about a young couple who is on a trip in a small town in Mexico. The man is a photographer. They visit a graveyard. There is a tradition held in this town where people who can afford to bury their dead in the graveyard will do so, but less affluent families are forced to have their dead mummified and placed in a cellar underground. The young couple is escorted into this hall, where dead bodies are lined up against the walls. The woman is quite frightened of this and does not like it at all. In fact, she hates it so much that she becomes afraid of the entire town itself and begs her husband to let them leave. However, the husband has a strange fascination with the chamber. He loves to photograph it and he's very interested in it, almost too interested. He finally agrees to leave the town, but, the next day, the car wont start up, and they figure out that it will take weeks to get it fixed, a fateful misfortune. The woman's thoughts become consumed by fright. She cannot think clearly. She thinks that she is dying. She begins to fear death. She imagines herself in that frightful hall of mummies and she cannot calm herself down. She starts to think that her husband is conspiring against her. He seems too calm. He tries to coax her into relaxation but to no avail. In the end of the story, the woman seems to die, and the husband seems to smirk, as if he had really been planning to bury her in this mummy chamber all along. This story was quite eerie and frightening to me. I thought about how even your own loved ones can turn against you. It brought back stories that I've heard throughout my life of husbands murdering their wives and vice versa. I'm reading Agamemnon in my Greek class, and we just discussed today how Clytaemnestra murdered her own husband when he returned home after conquering Troy. This theme of murdering loved ones seems to be a common one in literature and especially in Greek mythology.

The Dwarf

Today, I read a short story from one of Bradbury's collections titled October Country. It's called The Dwarf. The Dwarf takes place at a carnival. There is a dwarf who goes there every day, specifically to go into the mirror maze. A girl named Aimee notices him, and one day she and her immature coworker, Ralph, spy on the dwarf through a hole in the wall. They see that the reason he goes into the mirror maze is to look at himself in a mirror which distorts his figure and makes him look tall and thin. He stands in front of it and dances and laughs and smiles. Ralph finds it pathetic and hilarious while Aimee feels sorry for the poor man. She discovers more about him and learns that he is a writer and that he has published stories, notably one about a dwarf who is driven to murder due to society's inability to accept her. Ralph decides to play a mean joke on the dwarf, and replaces his usual mirror with a mirror that makes him even shorter, even fatter than he already is. When the dwarf goes into the maze the next day and sees this, he screams in utter terror. Now, this is where I became confused with the story. The ending did not make sense to me. The dwarf runs away and steals a rifle from the shooting booth at the carnival and he cannot be found. Then, Ralph looks into the mirror and sees a short, ugly man. I'm not sure if it is meant to be that Ralph has transformed into the dwarf or what. But, regardless of the ending, there are a few things that I took from this story. For one, it made me think about how much society pressures people to look a certain way and to act a certain way and what that can lead to. I find myself judging people all the time. It's a natural human thought process, I suppose it is meant to be a defense mechanism. However, I always try to stop myself and think about the person I'm judging. They may be horrible looking, deformed, dirty, homeless, or all of the above, but there is a story behind every person and every situation. I find that I am always rather afraid of homeless people. I don't look them in the eye, I try to walk as far away from them as possible, and I feel very uncomfortable when I approach one while I'm alone. I guess I'm just being careful, but I still feel a little guilty about doing it. Another thing that I thought of, sort of on the same topic, was anorexia. I couldn't help but draw the parallel between the dwarf looking into a mirror and seeing a tall, thin version of himself and a teenage girl looking into her own bathroom mirror and seeing a distorted and untrue version of herself and feeling the need to change that image.

The Lake

Today, I read one of Ray Bradbury's first short stories, The Lake. He refers to it as the first piece of work where his true literary voice emerged. I thought that the story was moving, but not as powerful or as well-written as his novels that I've read (Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles). There were some awkward sentences in there that I thought could use some revision. The first half of the story was a bit rough for me, but the second half was very well-written. I loved Bradbury's use of repetition. It's a very powerful literary tool. The story was quite depressing, telling the tale of a young boy whose adolescent love is drowned in a lake. He doesn't seem to understand at his young age exactly what it is that has happened to her, he just thinks that the river has taken her and will not let her come back. He builds half of a sand castle, and asks her to build the other half, a powerful image. As the story progresses, the boy grows into a young man, leaves his home, goes to college, and gets married. For their honeymoon, the "lovers" (he questions his love for her) return to his home town and to the very beach where his adolescent love was drowned. Coincidentally, or is it fatefully, a lifeguard is coming out of the water with a gray body bag. The boy asks him what is inside, and it's the girl. Then, he sees half of a sandcastle on the sand with little footprints leading from and back to the lake. His love for her is rekindled and he builds the other half of the castle before walking away. It's a tragic story. He will never be reunited with this girl that he loves, and it seems that he will not be able to move on and give his love to his wife. I love the ending because Bradbury puts in his usual twist of science fiction, the detail that goes against reality. I can really tell that this story is one of his earlier works, because his writing has improved drastically. I really enjoyed this story.

Fahrenheit 451

Last week, I began and finished reading "Fahrenheit 451", one of Ray Bradbury's most noteworthy novels. The story takes place in a dystopian America in which the job of a fireman is to burn books. The main character, Guy Montag, works as one of these firemen. Montag seems to enjoy his job, although he does not go as far as to accept the morality of it; he is simply ignorant of the consequences of his actions. One night, Montag happens upon his new neighbor, a young, innocent, and beautiful girl named Clarisse McClellan. Clarisse has a profound effect on Montag and opens his eyes to the terrors and corruption of the society in which he lives. The version of America described in this book, although grossly exaggerated, holds a shocking resemblance to the America I live in today. As I have been reading this book, I have been constantly disturbed by the ignorance and the absolutely incredulous passivity of the people surrounding Montag, namely his wife, Mildred. Towards the beginning of the book, Montag comes home after a long day of work to his wife sleeping in her bed. She has headphones in her ears, but not just the types of headphones that we use today. They're wireless and fit into your ears like little ear plugs. They're worn constantly to drown out the sounds of reality. They are constantly stimulating your brain with music and unreliable (but ignorantly trusted) news reports. It disturbs me that Mildred wore these even while she was sleeping. I'm not sure that I can say exactly why it disturbs me, but it does. Perhaps the absolute dependence on technology and the absolute disconnect from the world around her reminds me eerily too much of myself. This is the case so often when I'm reading this. Mildred spends her days in a room where three of the four walls is covered with a "wall TV." On the TV's exist what Mildred calls her "family," merely people projected on a screen who are programmed to speak her name. She has real feelings for these people, and spends countless hours "interacting" with them and watching them. The whole thing disgusts me. It reminded me so much of Facebook when I read about it, especially because of the term "wall" that was used to describe the TV screens. I absolutely loved this book. It has instantly become a favorite of mine. Bradbury's writing is beautiful and his constant use of metaphors and descriptive language  makes for a rich and captivating read.