A Sound Of Thunder Symbolism Analysis

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Symbolism In ‘A Sound Of Thunder’

You must be careful, but can you be careful enough to not change the future forever? In a time like the year 2055, time is everything. ‘A Sound Of Thunder’ by Ray Bradbury introduces this. The business that Mr.Travis and his friends run is very dangerous. If anything in the past happens that was not supposed to, they can be shut down. To prevent this, they have built special walkways, and do thorough planning on which animal to shoot, when, and where. The symbol in ‘A Sound Of Thunder’ that has been chosen is a butterfly because of the Butterfly Effect, the importance of staying on the trail (further explained later), and keeping the past the same.

The first reason a butterfly symbolizes this story …show more content…

“‘We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t like us here...Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species. .’” (page 2). If one small thing is changed, it could cause a domino effect, changing the future forever. No matter what the object is, Mr. Travis is explaining the significance of each and every organism in the environment. To follow up with what he had recently said, Mr. Travis goes into extraordinary detail about their process. “‘Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we only kill animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?’” (page 3). This connects to the thesis by helping prove the Butterfly Effect. The original Butterfly Effect states that a small change in a system can cause a larger difference later on (Wikipedia). The reason they make the arrival time so precise is so that they disturb as little as possible, decreasing the chances of changing the