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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
“There Will Come Soft Rains” begins with succinct prose that gradually builds the narrative tension to its climax. As the narrator describes a morning in the McClellans' house, most sentences are hardly more than a few words long. This syntactic simplicity initially lulls the reader into a sense of innocent comfort:
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.
As with its first descriptions of the singing clock, the story’s opening reads as carefree, almost childishly playful. The excerpt here even manages to sneak in a nursery-like end rhyme within these two sentences, bringing to mind the impression of domestic bliss (“away”/“tray”/“played”).
The story grows increasingly eerie as it progresses. After describing the “rubble and ashes” and its inventory of the McClellans' “charred” silhouettes, the sentences begin to underscore a disquieting tension instead of safety. By forcing the reader to pause, the story’s telegraphic phrasing now works with its subject matter to communicate unease and restraint. “The rest was a thin charcoaled layer,” the narrator says of the sooty outer walls that surround the vaporized McClellans. The simple prose that had previously comforted readers now signals that something is clearly awry.
The story’s sentence structure changes when the fire engulfs the kitchen. Almost like the flames themselves, the story suddenly bursts out in long, rhapsodic lines to describe the malfunctioning appliances:
In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-controlled mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away!
In contrast to earlier moments, the descriptions here have become delirious and uncontrolled, as though the tension built up over the course of the narrative is finally unraveling itself. The fire and its accompanying destruction seem almost reminiscent of the atomic bomb, and the story’s shift in style now draws attention to the devastation that it has suppressed for so long.
Related Themes:
