The Importance Of Individual Events In Ray Bradbury's A Sound Of Thunder

In Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder, Bradbury uses framing to portray the impact of individual actions. Early in the story, Travis, Eckels, and Lesperance travel through time. While they are traveling, Bradbury states “First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone!” (2). Bradbury’s choice of random dates illustrates that when the characters look to see when they are in history, nothing major is happening historically. Additionally, it becomes clear that the dates picked by Bradbury truly are randomly chosen, as Bradbury wrote this before any of the years listed have happened, making it impossible to link them to any certain event in history.

Here, Eckels takes a step off of the path but the worst part about it is that he stepped on a butterfly. This is a tragic event because that butterfly, through evolution, could theoretically change everything about humans. Although butterflies are known to be tiny and insignificant, this killing of a butterfly will prove to be the worst thing that could have happened, as the loss of the butterfly causes a domino effect of change to history. While Travis, Eckels, and Lesperance are traveling back to present day, Bradbury states ‘Switch on. Let’s go home.’ 1492. 1776. 1812” (7). Here, Bradbury uses the time machine to illustrate how much time has changed since the first time the time machine is