Juxtaposition In All Summer In A Day

Imagine being deprived of something you love, something that makes you happy, by people who couldn’t care less about your well being. This is what happens to nine year old Margot. All she wanted to do was see and feel the sun that she’d been missing for years and because her classmates couldn’t understand why she looked, acted, or talked the way she did the treated her with hateful actions and stole her opportunity to regain happiness for a brief moment by locking her in a closet for the minute period of time the sun would come out on Venus. In Ray Bradbury’s story, All Summer in a Day, he alludes to the theme that people treat those unlike them or those they cannot understand in hateful ways. Bradbury uses imagery to convey the difference …show more content…
Margot wrote a poem where she stated, “I think the sun is a flower,” and the other children describe the sun more aggressively as a fire. A world without the sun was an avalanche, a tornado, a volcanic eruption, catastrophic and destructive in every way, but once the sun was out it became “a beautiful tropic slide,” two very different images not battling but not concurring. Somehow this world was “flowering in this brief spring,” but was also, “the color of rubber and ash,” contradicting each other because of one thing, the sun. We see how different Margot thinks of the world than the other kids since she knows the sun better. The other kids have known this dark world their whole lives and are accustomed to it whereas Margot knows the beautiful world. The children can’t understand that Margot sees the drastic differences between the two worlds and don’t understand why Margot isn’t like them and contempt with the world they live …show more content…
We understand the perspective of both the other children and Margot from how Bradbury has chosen to place the point of view. We really see the difference when the children argue with Margot about how the sun looks, “she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them,” we know she remembers whereas the other children don’t have as good of an understanding as she does because they had only known the sun for one moment in their nine years whereas Margot knew the sun for four years of her life. Because of her different background and how she knows much more about the sun that the other children don’t Bradbury literally tells us that the other children hate Margot. He tells us that they hate her because of how she looks and acts and how she has a possible future compared to them only knowing the darkness of Venus. The children hate her so much they feel the need to lock her in a closet and steal her happiness from her. There’s Margot crying and begging to come out and the other children fully content with their actions just because Margot is different and they don’t like it. The other children go out and experience the sun “like animals escaped from their cave,” and Margot is left sad and trembling in the closet. Without the third person omniscient point