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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Bradbury’s writing style in “The Veldt” features figurative and poetic narratorial descriptions alongside long swaths of conversational dialogue between characters. The following passage—which comes near the beginning of the story as George and Lydia enter the nursery and see the virtual reality African veldt for the first time—captures the lyrical nature of Bradbury’s prose:
And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.
Bradbury’s language here captures the awe-inspiring nature of the nursery’s virtual reality feature. He deftly uses imagery to help readers experience the scene at a sensory level, as seen in the description of “feel[ing] the prickling fur on your hand,” feeling like “your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts,” hearing “the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling,” and smelling the meat in the lions' “panting, dripping mouths.” Bradbury also uses a simile when noting how the color of the lions’ eyes was “like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry.”
Passages like this help readers to understand how real the virtual reality feature in the nursery is, and therefore understand why the Hadley children are so enamored of it and are willing to kill their parents in order to have continued access to it (when their parents threaten to disable the technology).
Related Themes:
