Technology and Dehumanization Theme Analysis

Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian” narrates the life of Leonard Mead, a resident of an unnamed city in the year 2053. For 10 years, Mead has walked the city streets alone, night after night, past homes of other citizens who sit transfixed by their televisions. He is ultimately arrested merely for walking freely on the street, an absurd event that reveals Bradbury’s grim view of 21st century: it’s a dystopian world where technology has deadened the populace and enabled state power to enforce conformity. Bradbury’s short stories and novels frequently explore the social costs of technological progress. Through imagery of death, descriptions of humans in cars as insects, and Mead’s interaction with the robotic police car, “The Pedestrian” expresses the pessimistic view that the technological advances of the 1950s (like televisions, automobiles, and computers) will ultimately rob people of their essential humanity and give undue power to machines. 

As Leonard Mead walks through the city, the streets, homes, and people are all described with imagery of death. Through this use of morbid language, Bradbury predicts that one of the most exciting technological advances of his time, the television, will eventually deaden its viewers. Walking through the “silent and long and empty” streets is like “walking through a graveyard.” This establishes the landscape as one that has been robbed of all vitality by the television, which everyone is inside watching. The homes Mead passes are described as housing the dead: “tombs, ill-lit by television light.” The houses, too, are devoid of any signs of liveliness, and people’s pacification in front of their televisions inside these deathly structures indicates that modern technology is the cause. Passing one “tomb-like building,” Mead sees “gray phantoms” through open windows, and he hears “whisperings and murmurs” from the people within. The people inside watching their televisions are motionless and emotionless, metaphorically dead: “the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.” The people of 2053 are clearly more concerned with what is happening in the fictional, sensationalized realm of television than they are with their own physical surroundings—though they are superficially “touched” by what they watch, it has no meaningful, tangible impact upon them. Mead, then, is established as the last living soul in a world of empty, lifeless “phantoms” who are wholly consumed by technology.

In comparing the masses to the dead, Bradbury portrays people as having lost their uniquely human life force and spirit. He takes this notion a step further by critiquing the automobile’s effects on humans, likening people in cars to mindless, swarming insects rather than complex, sentient beings. Bradbury describes the city in the daytime as “a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far direction.” The people driving are not mentioned. Instead, the city of automobiles resembles a swarm of insects scurrying around. While walking puts Mead in direct, reverent contact with the beauty of his natural surroundings, those around him have become wholly disconnected from nature via their televisions and cars.

Even Mead, the sole pedestrian remaining in his city, is not immune to the dehumanizing effects of the automobile. As soon as he comes in contact with the police car, he is also likened to a helpless insect, “[standing] entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn toward it.” Here, Mead’s personality and individuality seem to disappear the moment he is forced to interact with the cold, robotic authority of the police car. Interrogated by the voice from the police car, Mead is further described as being like a bug on display: “The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.” This image of Mead as an insect killed to be studied foreshadows the story’s ending, when he loses his freedom and is taken away to a psychiatric institution, and thereby wholly stripped of his humanity and agency as an individual.

While technology is clearly dehumanizing people, Bradbury also depicts machines as becoming more human. The police car that accosts Mead in the street is made of the materials of technology but has human qualities, such as its “metallic,” “phonographic” voice that questions Mead. The voice from the car strips Mead of his individuality, defining him as deviant by the standards of this society, despite being subhuman itself. Mead is instructed to get in the back seat of the car, which is like “a little black jail cell with bars.” The “clean and hard and metallic” smells of the police car further reinforce its power to strip Mead of his humanity, as this unpleasant artificial environment starkly contrasts with the delightful, entrancing smells of the outdoors that he enjoyed on his walk earlier in the story. As Mead gets in the car, he sees that there is no one driving it. He asks the car where he is going, and it is revealed that the car is robotic and run by a remote computer: “The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes.” It is this robotic, inhuman entity that ultimately decides Mead’s fate and sentences him to be locked in a psychiatric institution and stripped of his dignity and freedom. Modern innovations like televisions, automobiles, and computers are manmade innovations, and Bradbury warns against the dangers of relying on these machines to the point that they control humans, rather than the other way around.

When “The Pedestrian” was published in 1951, sales of televisions were booming, car culture was taking over American cities, and computer technology was on the rise. Through his portrayal of a listless, soulless population contrasted with the sentient, authoritarian technology in the story, Bradbury predicted that within the next century, these technological developments would dehumanize and disempower the populace, turning neighborhoods into graveyards, homes into tombs, and people into phantoms and mindless insects. Moreover, he predicted that technology would be harnessed to enforce obedience to the social status quo and punish those, like Leonard Mead, who didn’t conform.