Ray Bradbury The Pedestrian Summary
To begin with, Bradbury crafts effective short stories through his use of analogies to communicate the theme and to hint at future elements of the story. For instance, in “The Pedestrian", when Leonard Mead goes on his daily walk, he sees “cottages and homes with their dark windows”, which he thinks is “not unequal to walking through a graveyard” (1). The neighborhood is compared to a cemetery, implying that the individual houses are tombstones; therefore, the people within the houses are figuratively dead, with no life and no emotions. By revealing the nature of the society, where the people do not have any freedom and are dull, Bradbury conveys the theme: societies are dehumanized when technology dominates. In another story, “There Will