Analysis Of Social Issues Represented In Ray Bradbury’S Books
Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois on August 22, 1920. He began writing around the age of 12 and hasn’t stopped since (Yabroff). His childhood would later be adapted into a few of his stories (Biography). He never became a student in a university, but instead he allowed for the library to be his alma mater and the books to be his professors (Biography). The art of writing imposed and affixed itself into his life at a very young age and granted him an extended time to hone his skills. His writing was ultimately crafted into that of a science fiction writer over the years as he explored his own creative processes. His works revolve around dystopian civilizations and excursions into the vast universe. Bradbury's writing is influenced by his views on politics, social conflicts, the idea of post-information, and even biblical stories and parables.
One of the topics most visible in Bradbury’s work to his readers is his use of technology when he expresses his political views in his writing. He is notorious for using people’s reliance on electronics and gadgets as the downfall of a group of people or even an entire civilization. In his famed novel, Fahrenheit 451, he expresses his views on how society has begun to leave knowledge and real-life experiences behind.
In short, the book entails the story of a firefighter DR DAVID SUTTONI can track this exact line to an online source. This is plagiarism. who is responsible for the burning of books in a much dystopian civilization and finds himself romanced by the very thing he is responsible for destroying. Bradbury expresses his views in this quote from the book: “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. ” (Fahrenheit). Bradbury grew up and matured in an era of society in which he saw technology change and advance and ultimately transform the way people live their lives. He watched automobiles become widespread, televisions tell the brutal tale of war, and cell-phones unwillingly weld themselves to the ear of their owner. While in an interview conducted in 1998 he was quoted as saying, “People are walking around the streets with phones to their heads talking to someone ten feet away. We've killed two million people with automobiles.
We're surrounded by technology and the problems created by technology, and science fiction isn't important? ” (Yabroff). It was his belief that the world he watched unfold around him had found its problems in the things that it had created to simplify life. His investment in science fiction was an asset in which he created realities and exposed the dangers of a reliance on technology versus the fool-proof safety of raw, acquired knowledge. Many of the stories told in The Illustrated Man, a compilation of Bradbury’s short stories, center around social issues that he witnessed, namely the subject of segregation and racial persecution. His story entitled The Other Foot tells of a parallel world in which whites, not blacks, are the discriminated minority. The basis of the story is in a world in which the entirety of African-Americans are exiled to the lonely planet Mars while the Earth falls in on itself in atomic warfare. To summarize the plot of the story, the inhabitants of Mars begin to breathe out threats when a white astronaut embarks on a mission to seek help for what remains of the population of Earth. The thoughts and actions of the Martians parallel the treatment of caucasian Americans to African-Americans.
An example of this is found on a train in which it is entailed “FOR WHITES: REAR SECTION. ” (Illustrated, p45) Bradbury was a part of the generation that watched segregation tear the United States in two as the civil rights movement came to a head. This story was his acknowledgement of the fact that for African-Americans, something major would have to shift in order for them to attain the change they sought to find (Minkser). The idea of such an exodus was birthed from his dream of a semi-utopian world in which the discriminated and segregated could live and thrive in the absence of racial oppression (Minkser). Within this tale he also expresses the anger of a culture through a parallel of reality in which Willie, a main character throughout the story, tells of what awaits a white man that would dare step foot on their lonely planet. “They can come up to live and work; why, certainly. All they got to do to deserve to do it is live in their own small part of town, the slums, and shine our shoes for us, and mop our trash, and sit in the last row in the balcony. ” (Illustrated, p42) The content of the quote most parallels the lifestyle of racial minorities prior to the shift in civil rights. Through The Other Foot, Ray Bradbury communicates not just his views on civil rights, but also what he saw in the world around him.
Ray Bradbury's tales and tragedies emphasized his adversity with the post-information age as he defended books and the knowledge they withhold. He wrote as neither a pessimist or even a hopeless optimist but managed to remain in a place of unrealized neutrality (Louv). His writing combatted the idea of post-informationism that later popularized itself with the emerging generation of Millenials. Post-informationism is the idea that information is now so available and abundant that it is completely irrelevant and that the only important form of information is the type that is traded between two individuals through conversation (Louv). In order to combat this psychological school of thought that has today become so prominent, he took to his paper and pen rather than a soap box. Going back to a previous, but appropriate, example, Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates and envisions a world in which any access to information is banned and burned, and if any one person is found with the paraphernalia of books or texts they will be burned along with their hoard of books, no matter how small the amount may be. The story's protagonist is Guy Montag and as he begins to indulge in a healthy, yet deathly illegal, habit, he finds that the world in which he lives and breathes has become so skewed from knowledge due to the abandonment of the scholarly influence of texts and novels. Ray Bradbury deals with this issue in a psychological manner in which he creates a story so pungent that no reader can help but to entertain the circumstances surrounding the outcome of the story. It was Bradbury’s belief that books were the way knowledge and wisdom were not only obtained, but transferred from one person to another. Psychology influenced his writing not as a “pusher” but as a “puller” that drove him to convey his argument and ideals in such a way that is a similarity between any author that writes a story laden with symbolism. Biblical allusions are not void within the tales of Ray Bradbury. Per an example, the story of Daniel from the Bible is found to be paralleled in the story of The Veldt (Yabroff).
The story of Daniel involves a man who is abandoned to the wrath and angst of lions and yet is miraculously extracted from his place of intended death without any sign of harm or ill-will. The story of The Veldt tells of a similar tale with a much more morbid and brutal conclusion in which a father and mother are relentlessly murdered by their own offspring. The influence of the Bible found in only a handful of his writing causes readers to question an even deeper more symbolic meaning to Bradbury’s work. Bradbury was not a religious man, however, like many Americans in his day, he went through the rites of church-hood as many did many other children. His ability to pull from one story and craft it into a work of his own did not just stop at the Bible but reached out to his own personal heroes such as Hemingway, one of the greater inspirations to his writing. The impact of biblical stories on his work gave to him only more material and room to build his dystopian universe of casualty, misfortune, and misadventure.
Ray Bradbury wrote with purpose and guise which was influenced by his experience and views of politics, social realities, psychological ideals, and biblical tales. Bradbury did not always consider himself a writer of science-fiction but on the occasion that he proclaimed himself to be of the former he made it very clear the purpose of his works. “. . . and it should be the function of every science fiction writer around. To offer hope. To name the problem and then offer the solution. And I do, all the time. ” (Biography). Ray Bradbury was a writer who shifted the way science-fiction is received and written. The story’s and pieces that he composed now live on to continue to share his insight on the world and the way we live in it. He didn’t just write what ifs, but took an eerie look into the ever-daunting what could be.
