The world in the year 2053 is populated by people who are more dead than alive. Their technology has made them very lazy. Walking has become obsolete, as the title of the story indicates. Leonard Mead is not a pedestrian; he is, in a city of three million people (105), the pedestrian. Walking had become so uncommon, that the sidewalk was “vanishing under flowers and grass” (104-105). Bradbury further illustrates the lack of foot traffic by stating that Mead had walked for ten years without meeting another person on the street (105). If the process of evolution holds true, the inhabitants of Bradbury’s future world will soon be without legs. Bradbury describes vividly the way these people hold their automobiles in a god-like reverence, describing their cars as “scarab-beetles” (105). The scarab-beetle was revered in ancient Egypt as a sacred symbol of the soul.
Complementing the people’s lazy bodies are their lazy minds. State of the art viewing screens have reduced the population to couch potatoes. The ease in which they live their lives has turned them from vibrant, thinking people into dull, lifeless zombies. Bradbury describes them in front of their televisions as “[sitting] like the dead, the gray or multi-colored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them” (105). Bradbury’s description of the “faintest glimmers of firefly light [appearing] in flickers behind …
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…re obvious than in the description of the police spotlight, which “held [Mead] fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through the chest” (105). The accomplishments of Leonard Mead and his kind will shortly be nothing more than exhibits in televised museums. A more subtle allusion to the fate of Leonard Mead is the street where he lives, South Saint James (105). Saint James was one of the twelve apostles, one who became a martyr for his beliefs.
Bradbury’s story is a bizarre twist to the Peter Principle. Man’s technological advances have eliminated the need for man. Bradbury brings his point home when the police car, carrying Leonard Mead, passes his brightly lit home. The bright lights represent the illumination of knowledge. Though the house is Mead’s, the police car passes it by, bringing an end to the last hope of a victory of humans over machines.
Use of Satire in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Effective Use of Satire in Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift’s story, Gulliver’s Travels, is a very clever story. It recounts the fictitious journey of a fictitious man named Lemuel Gulliver, and his travels to the fantasy lands of Lilliput, Brobdinag, Laputa, and Houyhnhmn land. When one first reads his accounts in each of these lands, one may believe that they are reading humorous accounts of fairy-tale-like lands that are intended to amuse children. When one reads this story in the light of it being a satire, the stories are still humorous, but one realizes that Swift was making a public statement about the affairs of England and of the human race as a whole.
In the beginning of the story, Gulliver explains to the reader a bit about his background, why he was on these journeys to begin with, and where he finds himself at the beginning of his tale. The story begins with Gulliver recounting how he was shipwrecked the land of Lilliput. He awakens to find himself tied down and held captive by a tiny race of people. To the inhabitants of Li…
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…ourneys to these lands. Swift did a excellent job of hiding a biting criticism of the government and society in which he lived. He did this by making the characters in the story so fantastic and foreign to the reader that the story could only be a fairy tale, written for children. The actions of the people he runs across are so absurd, and Gulliver seems so innocent, that at first read many people didn’t even get what Swift was trying to say. There were, however, people who knew Swift’s intentions from the start, and got all of the symbols in the story.