Like most of Ray Bradbury’s works, the story The Veldt is written in the fantasy genre. The plot develops in the most ordinary family of Hadleys: mother, father, and two children. They live in a modern smart house called “The Happylife Home” that does all the work for them (Bradbury 1). Their home can cook dinner, iron things, and even tie their shoelaces. What else does a family need for happiness? In the end, the story reveals that technological progress might lead to unpredictable and disastrous results that Bradbury conveys. This paper will analyze the setting of the novel The Vendt that reflects the consequences of consumerism and the technological advancements on people.
Ray Bradbury used juxtaposition to highlight the reverse development of interpersonal communication compared to the tremendous growth of technological capabilities available for people in The Vendt. Despite the expensive HappyLife Home “clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them,” habitants of the home became unnecessary to each other (Bradbury 1). The children, who played games in their room, separated from their parents, began to live in their fictional world. As parents said, “They live for the nursery,” where African veldt was created thanks to technological advancement (Bradbury 3).
The parents, on the other hand, felt lonely and agitated, and they realized that the games in the nursery had developed aggression in their children. Finally, when parents decide to prohibit children from using their “Africa in your living room,” childish hatred leads to the death of parents (Bradbury 2).
The veldt that children created in their nursery symbolizes the human nature that might become wild and disastrous. The picture of the veldt is set to be unpleasant and fear-evoking. “The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the strong dried blood smell of the animals,” – all the features of the African landscape serve to create an allegory for the human existence, noting that despite the progress people made, their nature did not change much, it stayed on the primeval level (Bradbury 1). Furthermore, the author utilizes epithets, such as “terrible green-yellow eyes” of lions or “dusty smell of their heated fur” to create a plausible picture of the setting and evoke fear, nervousness, and the sense of upcoming death (Bradbury 2).
The Veldt is exemplified to the point when a nursery in “The Happylife Home” is presented as having human feelings when George says: “I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off” (Nettles 1). Further, Lydia feels like the home, which cleans, cooks, and does everything, takes their motherly responsibilities, representing the allegory on the power of technologies that get more influential through time. Researches have also pointed out that the house in The Veldt “presents an unnerving picture of domesticity, technology and modernity, a picture that is eerily recreated in these technological homes.” (Lopez 2). The setting is a representation of a mistake people make when they prefer only material values, depriving other feelings, such as warmth and care.
To conclude, one can state that The Veldt is a fantastic story that is a signal to the future generation. The general fascination with the Internet, the creation of artificial intelligence, the realization of the idea of a “smart home” with technical capabilities, without sincere human feelings, can generate loneliness, rigidity, and indifference of people. The story criticizes the one-sided development of humanity, which consists of consumers, who, for the sake of comfort, toys, material values, are ready to kill each other and even the closest people. Ray Bradbury emphasizes that people might lose their human face in their quest for comfort, and they should be aware of such disastrous consequences that technological development brings.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. The Veldt. 1950. Web.
López, Ilse. “Architecture, technology and the uncanny: Infiltrating space in “The Veldt” and in “The Digital House Project””. Revista de Lenguas Modernas, 2017. Web.
Nettles, Taylor. “A technological invasion.” Artifacts Journal, 16, 2018. Web.