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Symbolism In There Will Come Soft Rains

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Higher Level (HL) Essay In the “Martian Chronicles”, how does Ray Bradbury use setting symbolism and different points of view to demonstrate different perspectives about the Cold War?

These three short stories “The Long Years,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and “The Million Year Picnic”, were collected from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles section set in the year 2026. They represent a dystopian future in which the Cold War became a nuclear one. The collection of short stories shows different perspectives of The Cold War using setting, symbolism, and different points of view. Ray Bradbury's 2026 Chronicles surely provided some perspective about the Cold War. Published in the first years of the Cold War, there was a lot happening both …show more content…

Once lay a city, but now only a lonely house “in a city of rubble and ashes” (p.222). The technologically advanced house continues its business, cooking breakfast, waking the family up, telling them about the weather, but the house’s words reach no ears. The city lies empty of human life. The house continues its chores even when the “gods,” referring to the humans in the house, “had gone away” (p.223). All that was left to show that humans once existed were the five sections of paint left on the black west sidewall. There on the wall left all that remained of the family. Their silhouettes are a snapshot of their actions on their fatal day. There on the wall, you could see a man mowing the lawn, a woman bent over picking flowers, and two kids playing with a ball. The silhouettes are reminiscent of the nuclear shadows that occurred within the bombing sites of Hiroshima and …show more content…

“Seven o’clock, Time to get up” (p.220), the alarm clock would say. The house made breakfast then by 8 o’clock the house shooed the people for school or work later on the house made dinner and warmed the beds. Much like the house people during the Cold War continued with their daily lives, they could push the Cold War to the back of their minds. Instead, this avoidance resulted in paranoia, resulting in the house and the people they represented as jumpy. In the back of their mind lay the worry that today would the day that their city would be

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