Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt is a futuristic short story centered on the idea of technological advancements that take over every aspect of human ability and inevitably cause the death of parents that attempt to shut it down. Bradbury helps readers understand the setting and the intended time frame using extremely graphic figurative language and tone using diction.
Figurative Language Describing Setting. Early in the story Bradbury uses figurative language when he talks about the veldtland and “the hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden lake, the great rusty smell of animals, [and] the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air” (Bradbury 1). This provides the reader with an exceptionally striking idea of the exact …show more content…
One instance of figurative language used to enhance Bradbury’s chosen time frame would be the use of the simile, “a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue into their slumber rooms” (Bradbury 5). The simile suggests a far more mechanically advanced society than that of today. Bradbury explains a device that is beyond modern years and without stating directly, portrays that the story is held in the future. An additional example found in the story, “[it is] all dimensional, superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. [It is] all odorophonics and sonics ” (Bradbury 2), also suggests the decade described is ahead of our own. The quote is a conversation George was having to Lydia about the walls. It is distinguishably of the future as walls of current time do not appear three-dimensional nor do they respond to mental orders. Another example of figurative language depicting the intended time frame would be when Bradbury personifies the house after turning off loads of machines, “the house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button” (Bradbury 9). The personification gives you a sense of the importance of the technology during the time at which the story was written. The machines are as human beings in this time period performing every task imaginable, and exhibiting the future as a technologically sound era. Bradbury’s use of figurative language in the preceding quotes bespeaks a futuristic time with technological advancements far beyond what has been conceived thus