Roman Analyzes a House...and Ray Bradbury's Short Story "There Will Come Soft Rains"

Never before have I read or listened to a more somber tale…with no sentient people. Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a 5-page poignant short story about a house that serves its family owners extremely dutifully and with a tight schedule. The story has a tragic twist, though, for the family has been dead, vaporized by a nuclear explosion that has destroyed an entire city. One of the last functional buildings standing is that house. Through visual imagery and structure of the story, Bradbury shows the audience the tragedy of a one and only purpose lost, and what something might do in response.

One literary technique Bradbury uses is visual imagery, as vivid details of how this house works to establish the tone and twist of this short story. At the beginning of the story, the house is shown attempting to wake everyone up, but Bradbury shows that no footsteps are made, no doors open, the garage door opens, and the car doesn’t leave. Breakfast is made, but it later shrivels and gets stale. This imagery establishes something wrong, not with the house, but the problem that no one is there. The visual imagery then shifts to the outside, where, in contrast to the clean inside of the house, everything is covered in soot and ash. In the distance, the city is “glowing with radiation”, but the saddest twist is when Bradbury reveals that the side of the house has 5 silhouettes cut out of the soot. One of a father, a mother, two children with their hands in the air, and the 5th being a ball suspended in the air. All of them forever imprinted on that wall for however long it stands. Using the visual imagery—although just as descriptive throughout the rest of the story—in the beginning establishes the tone of the whole story.

Ray Bradbury uses a strict, routine-like structure throughout the story, just like how the house works, and breaks it to show the new issues it has to face. One example is how things are shown to run on a timer, and how the house does things at certain times in paragraph structures. At “eight-o-one” it wakes the kids up to go to school, at “two o’clock” it blows away leaves, at “four-thirty” it sets up the nursery room for the kids. This routine structure is only broken when new issues that it has to solve are presented. For example, when wild animals approach the house, likely attracted by the aroma of food it has for periods of time. The house would snap things like shades and windows to scare the birds off. “No, not even a bird must touch the house!”. This shows that the house now has more issues to deal with to serve the dead family, and how it will break its own time schedule to keep this routine going (and maybe even keep its property value). 

Using vivid imagery and a routine structure, Bradbury shows how this house must live without its purpose, and how it being a robot, it simply keeps going. The story’s latter half is truly heartbreaking, and while the author also uses emotional diction, which I can’t talk about because of spoilers, details I have revealed in this essay show that this is simply an unfeeling machine with one job to do, and it does it.