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Analysis Of All Summer In A Day By Ray Bradbury

Decent Essays

Could you envision a planet that sees no sun? In the story, “All Summer in a Day,” Ray Bradbury draws us in, as readers, with a story that takes place on the planet Venus. The environment of Venus is as described in this quote, “It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the gush and gush of water...fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands…”(Bradbury, 1954) The only one that has experienced and remembers the sun is a young girl, Margot. Margot lived on Earth until she was four years old, unlike the others who have been living underground in Venus for their entire lives. Because of this, Margot is constantly facing problems regarding her classmates’ jealousy of her past opportunities. Without the sun, she has become, as Bradbury writes, “...a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost.”(1954, Bradbury) In this short story by Bradbury, the theme is that jealousy and ignorance can blind us from seeing things how they really are. This is shown time after time when Margot is harassed, depressed, and isolated because of her classmates’ jealousy. To begin, a way that Bradbury shows us that jealousy and ignorance can shield a person from the truth is through the main character, Margot, who is constantly being harassed by her classmates. The only reason Margot’s classmates harass her is because she remembers the sun. This makes her different from all the others, who have lived here on Venus since birth. In this way, they are uneducated or ignorant because they have never experienced the sun. Because she is different, the classmates take every chance they have to harass her in any way they can. Right before the sun came out, one of the rare events that Margot was greatly anticipating, the classmates “...surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a

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