The vent of the contraption is described as ‘sighing’: yet another sign of the house’s imitation of human behaviour. However, what does unite the house with its former occupants is that both will ultimately be destroyed by forces greater than themselves.īradbury’s reference to the incinerator, which he likens, in another simile, to ‘evil Baal’, is also revealing on several levels. The irony should not be lost on us: the simile is there to point up the ironic distance between the technological house and the recently destroyed humans for whom it was built. It was the architect Le Corbusier who declared that a house is ‘a machine for living in’, but in Bradbury’s story the machine has been stripped of its life.Īll of the technology mimics human activity in some way: the clock mimics human speech, and the mechanical mice (almost like something out of a fairy tale or Tchaikovsky ballet) mimic human cleaners.īradbury also uses a number of similes and metaphors which describe the house as a human body of sorts: he describes the house as having a ‘paranoia’ which is ‘old-maidenly’ in its nature, and he refers to the ‘nerves’, ‘veins’, and ‘capillaries’ of the house, as if it were a vast living organism itself. Of course, in an era in which our houses are filled with voice-activated technology, security cameras, electric dishwashers, broadband, and the rest of it (and living, lest we forget, in an age dangerously close to the year in which Bradbury’s story is set, 2026), Bradbury’s vision of a home dominated by such technology has largely come true. A robotic voice reads a poem chosen at random (something it does every day for the mother of the family): today, the poem is Sara Teasdale’s ‘ There Will Come Soft Rains’, a poem about ‘wartime’ which describes what the world would be like if ‘mankind perished utterly’: in summary, nature would not care and the world would carry on. In the afternoon, the automated devices in the house continue to prepare things for its owners, but there are still no humans in sight: the cards laid out for a game remain untouched and are cleared away. The debris is then deposited in an incinerator which the narrator likens to ‘evil Baal’, a ‘false god’ from the Bible.
The dog traipses mud into the house, and the robotic mice promptly clean up after him. It is shivering, emaciated, and covered in sores: although it’s not stated, it’s implied that this is a result of the nuclear attack which killed the dog’s owners. At noon, the family dog returns and the automated front door recognises the sound of its whine and opens to let it inside.
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