“The Pedestrian” is an interesting one for me as it is very unconventional, especially when comparing it to the likes of the previous short stories we read, like “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “Marigolds”. In these stories, the plot was outlined, in a way, so that we could identify how the story might end, and why it ended that way.
The story uses heavy amounts of imagery to help convey the loneliness and an empty quietness of the town in which the narrator resides. A heavy line which the author uses is “…there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.” This line draws the emptiness of the town, and possibly how quiet and dull it must be. Alternatively, there is this line, “… he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time,” which portrays an empty and seemingly post-apocalyptic type period. To think that the old man had been walking alone for 10 years is quite odd. Nevertheless, it …show more content…
It is similar to something my father told me when I was a child. He said that a TV was a “stupid box.” That was my father’s way of saying it would just make me less intelligent and I wouldn’t learn anything. I do not believe the author was trying to convey the same message as my father, but I do feel that Ray Bradbury did not like TV at all. A great example of this in the story is “…noticing his wrist watch. “Eight-thirty pm? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?” “What was the murmur of laughter from within the moon-white house?”” This, I feel, has much to do with people only responding to what occurs on the TV because of the mediocre nature of the examples. In my opinion, the old man’s questions are sarcastic in the sense that he only expects people to respond to one assortment of
The story uses heavy amounts of imagery to help convey the loneliness and an empty quietness of the town in which the narrator resides. A heavy line which the author uses is “…there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.” This line draws the emptiness of the town, and possibly how quiet and dull it must be. Alternatively, there is this line, “… he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time,” which portrays an empty and seemingly post-apocalyptic type period. To think that the old man had been walking alone for 10 years is quite odd. Nevertheless, it …show more content…
It is similar to something my father told me when I was a child. He said that a TV was a “stupid box.” That was my father’s way of saying it would just make me less intelligent and I wouldn’t learn anything. I do not believe the author was trying to convey the same message as my father, but I do feel that Ray Bradbury did not like TV at all. A great example of this in the story is “…noticing his wrist watch. “Eight-thirty pm? Time for a dozen assorted murders? A quiz? A revue? A comedian falling off the stage?” “What was the murmur of laughter from within the moon-white house?”” This, I feel, has much to do with people only responding to what occurs on the TV because of the mediocre nature of the examples. In my opinion, the old man’s questions are sarcastic in the sense that he only expects people to respond to one assortment of