Symbolism In The Pedestrian By Ray Bradbury

Words: 1140
Pages: 5

Difference

In the short story, The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury is about a man named Mr. Mead. Mr. Mead walks around at night to get air and to see and while he walks, you get to know about the town, and the people in the town who live in the year 2053. The Pedestrian, Ray Bradbury uses descriptive language, symbolism, and analogies to show Mr. Mead’s difference in what they think is a normal town.
First, Ray Bradbury uses descriptive language to give readers a vivid image of what the town is like and prove that Mr. Mead is different in this town. “The street was silent and long and empty with only his shadow moving like a hawk in midcountry. If he closed his eyes and stood very still, he could imagine himself upon the center of a plain,
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Mead is different. The symbolism in this short story is the houses that Mr. Mead sees while walking and the sidewalks he uses. The symbolism of the houses is that all the houses in the beginning are dark, and the people inside them match what their houses look like. On page 1, he writes, “Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomb-like building was still open.” This shows that all the houses were like walking through graveyards, which are dark and empty. In the middle of the story, Bradbury mentions the houses again but Mr. Mead talks to them. “‘Hello, in there,’ he whispered to every house on every side as he moved. ‘What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?’” This shows that Mr. Mead is different, because usually people don’t talk to houses. At the end of the story, Bradbury uses the houses again. “They passed one house on one street a moment later, one house in an entire city of