‘The Last Night of the World’ is a short story by Ray Bradbury written in a genre of speculative fiction. It presents an evening dialogue between spouses who are drinking coffee and watching their daughters play on the rug. It is an entirely ordinary evening except for the dream they both had several nights ago. Their friends had the same dream, in which a voice had told them that the world was about to see its end in the nearest time.
The unanimity of the spouses’ position is outstanding. They both realize that everything is over: the world is going to stop, but they are not frightened as they both understand that “this is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we’ve lived” (Bradbury, 1951). Everything is predetermined and all that can be done is making peace in the face of irreversibility and finality of doom. Submission to the logic of unfolding events makes the main idea of this short story. This is an alarming warning to humanity made by a peerless master of a parable.
References
Bradbury, R. (1951). The Last Night of the World. Web.