Athreya Ramesh
Bradbury Juxtaposition Rewrite
September 30th, 2015
Section O
The eternal struggle between the forces of order and chaos are eminent throughout literature in
every culture. In two of his short stories, “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” and “The
Pedestrian,” Ray Bradbury focuses on how technological advance augments this clash in two different
ways. “August 2026” focuses on the aftermath of a technologically advanced nuclear conflict, whereas
“The Pedestrian” focuses on a society that is entirely reliant on technology. The conflict between order
and chaos is demonstrated throughout both “The Pedestrian” and “August 2026: There Will Come Soft
Rains” by the characterization and descriptions of Leonard Mead and the house.
The characterization of Leonard Mead demonstrates the conflict of order and chaos between
him and the oppressive society. In “The Pedestrian, Leonard Mead struggles against the conformity of
society. This conformity is shown when Mead sees “the cottages and homes with their dark windows,
and [his journey] was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of
firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows.” Every other person in this society is inside his or
her houses watching television, and only Leonard Mead sees the value of experiencing nature and
enjoying it. This similarity represents order, and as Mead pushes against it, he represents chaos. Conflict
between these two forces arises when a robotic policeman arrests Mead and takes him to “the
Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies,” once the machine learns that Mead is very
different compared to everyone else, due to his evening walks, lack of a “viewing screen,” and a lack of a
wife. Mead is characterized as a lonely man, unmarried and alone on the streets as he takes his walks,
and Bradbury shows him as an outlier to society, a chaotic imbalance in a society that conforms to
preserve order.
The characterization of the house as it is obliterated by the fire represents the struggle between
order and chaos. In “August 2026” the house runs everything it does on a schedule in increments of
fifteen minutes. Such extreme organization is shown in the beginning of the story with the house
announcing, “Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock!” followed by,
“Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!” Each of these pronouncements relates to a responsibility or
an activity, such as the production of breakfast and the act of serving it to the nonexistent inhabitants.
This scheduled process represents the order in the house because everything is in its place at the right
time. However, this orderliness changes when the fire starts and begins to destroy the house and flout
its order and organization. This change is shown when “the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with
flaming ease from room to room,” and as ”the attic smash[ed] into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into
cellar, cellar into sub-cellar.” The fire represents chaos, which disrupts and obliterates the peaceful
order of the house. When the house dies, and Bradbury describes the house as, “wail[ing], ‘Fire, fire,
run, run’, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone,”
chaos literally kills the order and peace of the house.