Symbols in the “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury In the short story August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains Ray Bradbury focuses readers’ attention on the last day of a smart house. Unlike its owners and other people, the building survived in an unnamed disaster with all its mechanisms and continued to follow its habitual schedule for some time. But it lost the last battle with forces of nature. Symbols in the story depict two different themes: the American dream or its horrible post apocalyptic interpretation, and the alienation. The last term means an indifferent attitude to the surrounding environment and a feeling of an absence of connections with it. It is impossible to talk about feelings or emotions of the house’s artificial intelligence; it looks more like a …show more content…
On the other side, system’s actions can be treated as signs of alienation caused by the catastrophe. The house behaved like a survived victim of the catastrophe. A shocked person tries to hold onto habitual things and processes as he or she cannot abandon this last illusion of a previous normal life; even if these actions are useless. The house behaved the same way: Each day it prepared meals, cleaned rooms and took other measures to make its owners’ life comfortable. But all these actions were mechanical repetition of a previous normal life. The dead dog became the major symbol of house’s alienation. The system let the injured and exhausted animal in, but did not do anything to try to improve its condition. It returned to habitual schedule that was a more important link to the past than the family’s pet. “The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died” (Bradbury 2). Pet’s actions could be a sing of rabies or other disease, but it is more likely it was not the first dog’s visit to