What does the fire symbolism in There Will Come Soft Rains?

Symbols in the “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury In the short story August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains Ray Bradbury focuses readers’ attention on the last day of a smart house. Unlike its owners and other people, the building survived in an unnamed disaster with all its mechanisms and continued to follow its habitual schedule for some time. But it lost the last battle with forces of nature. Symbols in the story depict two different themes: the American dream or its horrible post apocalyptic interpretation, and the alienation. The last term means an indifferent attitude to the surrounding environment and a feeling of an absence of connections with it. It is impossible to talk about feelings or emotions of the house’s artificial intelligence; it looks more like a…show more content…
On the other side, system’s actions can be treated as signs of alienation caused by the catastrophe. The house behaved like a survived victim of the catastrophe. A shocked person tries to hold onto habitual things and processes as he or she cannot abandon this last illusion of a previous normal life; even if these actions are useless. The house behaved the same way: Each day it prepared meals, cleaned rooms and took other measures to make its owners’ life comfortable. But all these actions were mechanical repetition of a previous normal life. The dead dog became the major symbol of house’s alienation. The system let the injured and exhausted animal in, but did not do anything to try to improve its condition. It returned to habitual schedule that was a more important link to the past than the family’s pet. “The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died” (Bradbury 2). Pet’s actions could be a sing of rabies or other disease, but it is more likely it was not the first dog’s visit to

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A common saying is "a dog is a man's best friend." Dogs represent the virtues humans want them to have in their role as the first domesticated animal: loyalty and protection. However, in this story Bradbury uses situational irony by showing what happens to this partnership when one party (humanity) is removed. The house recognizes the dog and lets it in the house—the only animal it admits—but its programming is too rigid to care for the dog. It makes and destroys food automatically rather than giving the food to the sick and starving dog. In the end the purely rational house can do nothing more for the dog than dispose of it once it dies.

The House

The smart house in this story is both a character and a symbol. As a character, it fights the forces of chaos and entropy to maintain the routine for which it was designed by the now extinct humans. It is ultimately unsuccessful, and by the end of the story the house is "dead." The house's meaning as a symbol is closely related. The Dictionary of Symbolism indicates houses are sacred and represent the universe. In therapy based on the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961), houses represent the people who live in them, and the structure of a house can reflect the people who live in it. This house bears the mark of the people who lived in it—they are charred into it with fire—but a second fire obliterates that mark by destroying the house. Bradbury specifically indicates that the house collapses from the attic down into the cellar, suggesting the highest levels of consciousness collapse into the lowest, most primal and unconscious levels at the story's end.

The Fire

Traditionally, fire is a two-sided symbol: it warms and comforts, but it also burns and destroys. When it burns and destroys, it symbolizes passions that have gone out of control. Both sides of fire make their appearance in this story. The house cooks breakfast for its absent people, incinerates the body of the dead dog, lights a fire in the hearth, and provides cigars; all of these demonstrate fire's wonderful domestic possibilities. However, the negative side of fire plays an even larger role in this story. Though it happens before the story starts, there are the firestorms started by nuclear war. Within the story a fire destroys the house just as the fire of nuclear war destroyed civilization. This burning demonstrates another of fire's common symbolic meanings: purification.

The Poem "There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time)"

Bradbury's story takes its title from a poem by Sara Teasdale. Published in 1920, this earlier work, titled "There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time)," is just 12 lines long. The house claims to select it at random for the lady of the house, but if it is random, it is exceptionally good chance. Teasdale was born in 1884 and died (of suicide) in 1933. Her poetry was known for its classical form, lyric beauty, brevity, and passion. She wrote a number of anti-war poems in response to World War I (1914–18). This poem comments on war, but its focus is still broader: it suggests that if humanity completely vanished from the world, nature would not just go on—it wouldn't even notice. This happens in the story; readers get to witness nature reclaiming the last vestige of human technological civilization. By including the poem, Bradbury makes the story reflect on itself. He also foreshadows the fact that the house will end.

Breakfast

The cybernetic house in this story follows its programming around the clock. It prepares all the meals of the day, including a snack for the bridge game it tries to host. However, Bradbury gives far more attention to breakfast than any other meal in the story. The story starts in the morning, and breakfast is the first meal prepared—and the first not eaten. When the dog is searching the house for its humans, it smells pancakes behind a closed door and goes wild with frustration. When the fire is raging, it isn't steak or sandwiches the stove is making at a "psychopathic rate"; it is breakfast: 120 eggs, 240 pieces of bacon, etc. Breakfast is everywhere throughout this story. Breakfast, associated with morning, symbolizes the start of a new period or venture. In this story the new venture is hollow and empty: there are no people to eat the breakfast or take part in the new day. The new venture is life on Earth with only a vestige of humanity.

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control 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! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.