50 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Veldt
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Satire
Satire is defined as “the use of irony, sarcasm, or ridicule in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.” (Webster’s College Dictionary). Bradbury makes extensive use of satire to mock the delusions of his characters and the absurdity of their technological addiction. Bradbury describes a chair that responds to a person’s distress by rocking her, a kitchen that spontaneously cooks food, and machines that tie shoes and brushes teeth. The “picture painter,” owned by Peter, is a sign that creativity has been abolished. Characters speak to the machines as if they are people: Peter wails at the ceiling “as if he was talking to the house, the nursery” (251).
Bradbury satirizes the consumerist tendencies in mid-20th-century American society by depicting the Happy-life Home as a coveted status symbol (“Every home should have one” (241). The name of the home itself is satirical, suggesting a complacent and childish self-satisfaction. Bradbury says that the home “was good to them” (239), a phrase that mocks the materialistic tendency to equate goodness with comfort.
In one telling moment, Bradbury highlights the limits of the Hadleys’ technology: “And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour” (247). Although the machines meet every human need, there is irony in the fact that they are unable to meet this demand.
Foreshadowing
Bradbury foreshadows the demise of George and Lydia several times in the story. First, Lydia hears human screams and she and George see vultures circling there. Later, George discovers his mangled wallet and Lydia’s bloody scarf there. George’s sudden thoughts of death as he eats dinner also function as foreshadowing of his death, as does Peter’s exclamation to his father’s face “I wish you were dead!” Later, George realizes that the house with the machines shut off resembles a “mechanical cemetery” (251).
Imagery
Imagery is a literary device that uses figurative language to describe something with consideration to the senses. In “The Veldt,” the author describes the nursery using the senses of touch, smell, and sound:
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths (241).
By contrast, the characters’ descriptions receive little attention; only the two children have any sort of physical description at all. This is because Bradbury is mainly concerned with the home and its technological trappings, the main instigating factor in the story. The lack of vivid description of the characters is counteracted by a tangible sense of setting.
Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a device in which the reader of a novel is privy to information that the characters in the novel are unaware of.
There are moments in “The Veldt” the reader is aware of something that the characters do not know. George and Lydia see and hear ominous premonitions of their demise in the form of screams, vultures, and items of theirs lying bloodied on the nursery floor. These events are a foreshadowing something deadly, but the characters are oblivious to this: “I don’t see anything wrong” (240). When Peter threatens his father with lines like “I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father,” (248) and “Oh, I hate you!” (251), we sense that they will lead to violent actions. At the very end, Mr. McClean stands in the nursery as the children calmly eat their picnic, unaware that the Hadley parents have just been killed by the lions and polished off by the vultures.
Related Titles
By Ray Bradbury
