literary analysis paper

Daniel Gallagher Literary Analysis 1

English Comp 2

August 30, 2009

Literary Analysis Paper

August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains


In Ray Bradbury’s story, August 2026: There Will Come Soft., he uses

personification to give this lonely surviving house living qualities by showing

progression of a typical day of this futuristic and seemingly living house void

of humans. Electric voices, electric eyes, and mechanical animals with pink

electric eyes seem to dominate this otherwise deserted house amongst the

rubble and chaos of the ruined city. Even though people are gone, the house

lives on as if it is the last survivor in the city in this hypothetical future.

The house of the future in Bradbury’s story has many features to make

your life easier by automating every day tasks such as, electric automated

devices that clear food away and wash the dishes that the food is sitting on

and at the end of the cycle the dishes are clean and ready to be put away in

one step, cleaning devices in the house are given names of animals and

animal body parts such as; pink electric eyes, mustached runners, and even

the places where they resided; Bradbury called burrows.

The sense of eerie isolation and abandonment you get in this story

very apparent to the reader by the use of descriptive imagery in a quote that

illustrates that it prompts for an action by a person only to wait and hear

silence because it is all alone and unaware that it is alone as in this quote,

“The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the

emptiness… outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the

awaiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.” Illustrating that

nobody is getting in that car.


The house has a voice of its own, inquiring about possible visitors or

intruders such as in one instance when it asks if anybody is there and getting

no answer to passing foxes and cats. As the day progresses, the house sets

up a table for bridge and the drinks, sandwiches, and cards which of course

are untouched. The house asks the lady of the house what poem she would

like and only silence is heard.

The house tries to protect itself by using artificial intelligence and

mechanical devices to extinguish fires by deploying built in sprinklers and

mechanical creatures embedded in walls that spray water. The efforts are in

vane as the fire consumes the seemingly perfect and futuristic foolproof

house. The house continues the battle against the flames with the blind

robots that their faucet mouths with fire retardant green chemicals. The

house shutters under the heat of the fire and the house begins to collapse.

Electronic voices in the house die, the wires wither and the circuits crack

from the heat of the fire and all that is left standing is a single wall with a

voice that repeatedly says, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5,

2026, today is…” almost as if the house knows nothing but to persevere and

keep doing its job until it is physically impossible.

In conclusion, it seems to me that we have all these conveniences that

do our mundane chores so effortlessly, but we end up destroying ourselves

with other technological advances we have created. Our efforts are in vane

even for the safety features built into the house. At the end of the day, a fire

destroys the house even though it furiously tries to put it out. Hopefully by


reading this story, it is a warning to our leaders to what will happen if we end

up using our weapons of mass destruction.

literary analysis paper

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