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Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Fire:
If the McClellans’ house is the story’s main character, then fire is its central antagonist. After a falling tree bough crashes through the window and sends cleaning solvent over the stove, the kitchen immediately catches flame. The night fire is untamed and uncontrollable—it tears through the house despite the technological devices’ most desperate attempts to contain it.
Earlier mentions of fire establish a close association with death and rebirth. Shortly before dying, the McClellans’ dog runs in circles with “eyes turned to fire.” In Teasdale’s poem, where a verse foretells a time when “robins will wear their feathery fire,” flames meanwhile speak to a defiant capacity for regrowth. Fire bears the suggestion of both life and its absence, foreshadowing the flames to come that night.
In its larger, full-blown form, the fire at the McClellans’ house embodies this paradox of life and death. It is, by all accounts, a destructive force: the flames make quick work of the squeaking mice and hardly diminish under the mechanical rain. Unlike the McClellans’ dog, it successfully shrugs off all of the technology’s attempts at order.
The story portrays the fire as something that is as creative as it may be violent. In its most ironic sense, this act of destruction becomes a source of life. The fire wreaks havoc on the house but also comes closest to attaining life’s full organic force. “Now the fire lay in beds, stood in the windows, changed the colors of drapes!” the narrator exclaims, using personification to deepen the sense of fire as a thing with agency. The flames feed upon the Picassos and even the closet’s clothes as they retreat from the repellent. There is even a sense of playfulness as it outmaneuvers the repellant and sends its flames crackling up through the windows. Fire becomes the only actual inhabitant in this empty house, however short-lived its stay may be.
Related Themes:
Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Teasdale's Poem:
One of the story’s central ironies lies in its tension between promises of nature’s recovery and manmade destruction. As night descends upon the McClellans’ household, the home’s robotic voice reads aloud Sara Teasdale’s poem:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
These excerpted stanzas bring to life a world that is blissfully devoid of civilization. The story’s titular poem imagines a return to an era free from any human traces. In this poem, nature has not only reclaimed the earth but erased the monuments of technology and progress entirely. The “tremulous white” plum trees and circling swallows support the impression of an idyllic paradise untainted by human greed or “war.” In this state, the forces of nature are oblivious and even cruelly indifferent to humanity’s petty conflicts or agonies: neither bird or tree would care “if mankind perished utterly,” and Spring would “scarcely know that we were gone.” The natural world mocks human hubris through its flourishing.
The poem’s reliance on the future tense adds to the idea of eternal, carefree ignorance. Through its emphasis on the soft rains and singing frogs that “will come,” Teasdale’s poem seems to prophesy an end of time. If humanity has already invited a nuclear apocalypse upon itself, then the poem forecasts—in almost biblical fashion—a future of regeneration that lies outside of time. In one sense, then, Teasdale’s poem foreshadows the imminent destruction of the McClellans' house. Nature intrudes through the kitchen window in the form of a tree bough, sets the kitchen ablaze, and singlehandedly destroys the gadget-laden house.
But the promise of nature’s regrowth remains ironically unfulfilled by the end of the story. “One wall” remains among the smoldering ruins, and the clock still blurts out the time the next morning. Humanity’s footprints have not been erased as surely as Teasdale’s poem might seem to suggest. Rather, Bradbury’s story leaves uncertain whether the natural world will ever recover from the consequences of nuclear fallout—perhaps human hubris has destroyed the planet to the point where plum trees and frogs are simply impossible. Beyond brief mentions of stray sparrows, “lonely foxes,” and “whining cats,” the story does not offer any clues that organic life might exist beyond the house’s perimeter, and in the place of regeneration its ending merely leaves us with a “great quantity of smoke” and mess of “heaped rubble and steam.” This bleak conclusion potentially undermines the expectation of regrowth that Teasdale herself had offered.
Related Themes:
