There Will Come Soft Rain Literary Devices

Bradbury uses several different literary devices in his writing to effectively convey expression to the reader. *Whether it be something simple like comparing a blade of grass to a bird flying in the wind, or the gurgling sounds of what lurks below in the deep ocean, he makes excellent use of this technique. For one example, take a look at his work that uses Simile. In the story “Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed”, he writes, “Mars, the cinnamon dust and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in the Mars summer.”. He is comparing the environment of Mars heat to gingerbread shapes in summer. Another example, this time from the story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, Bradbury here compares hair, dust, and other bits of dirt in the house to

This is most prominent in the story “There Will Come Soft Rains”. The story features a house who performs many human actions, making this a perfect story to use this literary device. For one example, Bradbury writes, “The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.”, this phrases the house as a living organism with flesh and bone and blood but in reality it’s a wood and steel infrastructure. Another example of personification in Bradbury’s work would be in the story Fahrenheit 451. In the story, he writes, “He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.”. Here the books are given the ability to die. This is a quality only things that possess life can enjoy and sadly, books are not alive. Personification is also used with the quote, “A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again.”, from the story “All Summer in a Day”. A forest can not grow up, yet he writes it as if it really could just like a small child would someday reach adulthood. The short story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”, you can find the very short quote, “The wind blew, whining.”. The wind simply cannot whine.

Bradbury uses metaphor quite a bit, for example in the story, “ Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”, He uses the quote, “The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea-meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows.”. A similar metaphor is used in the story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, when Bradbury writes, “The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs.”. The quotes are similar as they are both wording places as something they're not, but also different in the way that the quote from “There Will Come Soft Rains” paints the house as bustling and full in a way the Martian town is not. In the story Fahrenheit 451, you can see a quote reading, “With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”. There are multiple metaphors in this sentence as you can observe the brass nozzle transforming into a great python spitting venom instead of water. His hands are also suddenly a conductor's hands playing a symphony which seems unlikely. In the story “All Summer in a Day”, you can see the metaphor , “She was an old