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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Veldt
The veldt (from Afrikaans for “field”) is open, uncultivated country characteristic of parts of South Africa. It is thinly forested with grass, bushes or shrubs and is home to a variety of wildlife. Tellingly, Bradbury’s title refers not to the real thing (as we might assume before reading the story) but to its imitation in the Hadley nursery. This is a signal that the blurring of reality and fiction will play a major role the story.
The nursery simulates the African veldt in multimedia fashion with startling fidelity, “in colors reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw” (240). Visitors can smell animals and dust and hear distant antelope and vultures. The veldt represents a place of excitement and adventure for the children, conjuring up the exotic world of Africa, but it is also a wild, frightening and disturbing place with menacing lions and circling vultures, adverting to the presence of death, as well as the smell of blood and a burning sun “like a hot paw” (243).
The veldt represents the primal side of man—a side that is hidden by the trappings of civilization but, once unleashed, can create wild and violent passions. Bradbury portrays this as a dangerous force that can wreak havoc on individuals and society. George comments that the veldt is “a little too real” (240), even though it is created out of such artificial means as “odorophonics” and “mental tape film.” Responding “telepathically” to human thoughts and desires, the nursery can create any setting imaginable. Bradbury uses the veldt to comment on the increasing importance of entertainment in modern society and its tendency to become “virtual reality.”
The veldt recalls debates in the 2000s about the desirability of letting children consume violent entertainment in the form of television, movies, and video games. David McClean argues that the veldt has become a surrogate parent (249). It has taken the educational place in the children’s lives that should be filled by parents and school.
The Nursery
The nursery may be considered separately from its guise as the veldt. Normally, a nursery is a symbol of play and innocence. The nursery is a “make-believe world” (243) where the Hadley children go to fantasize and be themselves, but because of the substance of their fantasy, it takes on more sinister overtones. It becomes a sort of parallel reality, a rival to everyday reality that threatens destruction.
Plastic carnival
This is the attraction that detains the children and makes them late to dinner. It is another symbol of childhood and play that acquires negative overtones. Bradbury does not explain what a “plastic carnival” might be, but we can imagine a carnival in which all the stands, attractions, and even the people are made of plastic. Thus, it would represent another form of simulated reality like the veldt. In Bradbury’s futuristic world, counterfeits increasingly take the place of real things, objects, and relationships. The idea of a carnival suggests the notion that in the future, entertainment and play take the place of serious concerns and responsibilities.
Presages of Death
While inspecting the nursery with George, Lydia hears a distant scream. It is the first of several premonitions of death in the story. Later, while eating dinner, George starts musing about how the veldt puts death in the minds of the children, and how they are too young to be thinking of such things. George’s mangled wallet and Lydia’s bloodied scarf, both found on the floor of the nursery, become further premonitions of their grisly death. Later, Lydia and George repeatedly hear screams coming from the nursery.
The death motif resurfaces when an angry Peter tells his father “I wish you were dead!” (251), and George responds: “We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living.” It looks momentarily as if the Hadleys will triumph over technology, but such is not to be the case. The ending of the story is tragic, including the death of the two adults. Another allusion to deaths comes when, after shutting down the machinery, George observes that the house resembles a “mechanical cemetery” (251), and the parents’ manner of death is foreshadowed in Bradbury’s description of the nursery feeling like a “hot paw.”
For Bradbury, runaway technology gives rise to angry passions and, ultimately, death and destruction.
Santa Claus/Scrooge
David McClean poses this metaphor of two different kinds of parenting. At first, George acted like Santa Claus, giving his children everything that they could possibly want. The nursery became a surrogate parent, “far more important in their lives than their real parents” (249). Now, when George threatens to turn the nursery off, he starts to resemble Ebenezer Scrooge. Thus, it’s only natural for the children to rebel. The Santa Claus/Scrooge metaphor implies that the havoc in the children’s lives is the fault of their parents and of the adult world; they have made the children what they are.
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