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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Bradbury’s writing style in “The Pedestrian” combines figurative and poetic language (when channeling the thoughts of the protagonist Mead) and short and curt dialogue (when capturing the conversation between Mead and the automated police car). The following passage—which comes near the beginning of the story as Mead begins his evening walk—captures the poetic nature of Bradbury’s prose:
Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.
Bradbury waxes poetic when comparing the city to “a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows” and where “gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night.” This metaphorical language of “graveyard” and “gray phantoms” (as well as “tomblike”) paints a picture of the city as a place of death, where living people become nothing more than disembodied ghosts locked in front of their television sets.
This language is also notable because it demonstrates how the narrator—a self-identified writer—sees the world. Because he has resisted the power of the TV and refused to conform to this society’s rules, he has been able to retain his creative and critical thinking, which allows him to see and express the dehumanization he is witnessing with rich figurative language like this.
Related Themes:
