There Will Come Soft Rains Literary Devices

Technology has become a massive part of our lives, enabling people to do everything from talking to a person 5000 miles away to tracking how many steps we take each day. However, is it possible that with the overuse in technology these days, we will one day be eradicated by the very thing we invented? In the short story There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury, such a disastrous situation occurs. In the story, a lone house in a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb runs by itself, although no one lives in it. The story illuminates the concept that our technological creations may outlive us and even destroy us. Using a variety of literary devices, Bradbury emphasizes that we have become too dependent on technology, but that if we recognize such

Personification is prevalent in the story, adding to its eerie tone. In the story, the only characters are machines and objects; no humans are alive. Since there are no human characters in the plot, the objects are given human characteristics, also adding to the message of the story that technology will outlive us even when we don’t exist. Bradbury describes the results of a tremendous fire as, “A pump shrugged to a stop... The house shuddered, oak bone on bone” (3). In this quote, the author is using personification to show that technology will replace us someday by doing what humans do. The objects all inherit human qualities and actions, showing that they will survive when we don’t. Another literary device that Bradbury uses to illustrate the theme is tone. Throughout the story, the tone is mainly very chilling and gloomy. The author again describes the fire as “It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings” (4). Here, Bradbury doesn’t just say that the fire burned the paintings, but describes the scene with depth and vivid diction to help readers visualize such scenes and make the tone chilling. The tone adds to the theme by basically stating that, without us in the world, the world will essentially be the same. Furthermore, the imagery in the story is very descriptive and adds to the theme and the eerie tone. One strange description is “The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick three flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and