A House Deserted

In Ray Bradbury’s 1950 post-apocalyptic short story, “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains,” the viewer is treated to a day in the life of an automated house as it tends to a family that it no longer shelters. The short story uses the house’s futile and mechanical devotion to demonstrate the hollow loyalty of machines.

The house represents Man’s artifice, technology as a whole, which has allowed man to achieve dominion over this earth. This house is completely automated, robotics on steroids. It handles its own work and maintenance, and stands “alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night, the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.” (Bradbury 1) Note the clear juxtaposition between the two technologies: this wonderful robotic house that serves and protects man and the thermonuclear weapons that cleansed him from the city.

The house is a servant. It dutifully goes through clockwork motions designed to ease the day of its inhabitants. Its robotic voice calls out at 7:00 AM to wake its family. It automatically prepares a perfect breakfast of “perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk,” at 7:09 sharp (Bradbury 1). The machinery of the house is cheerful throughout the day as it goes about cleaning itself spotless with robotic mice and disposing of the breakfast food that clearly went uneaten (Bradbury 1).

The industry of the house is its grand irony. It exists to serve humanity, but without humanity to serve, it mechanically goes through the motions without regard to their necessity. This machine is not a living thing. It has no heart or soul, only programming. It has no regard for life or death, it only understands input and output. It can only do what humans have demanded of it. Similar to this automated house of wonders, thermonuclear weapons had rained down on the city of Allendale, California exactly as they had been programmed to do. They automatically executed their commands like clockwork without concern for life or death. These two machines behaved in the exactly same manner, they simply had different input and output.

The introduction of the family dog clarifies the distinction between life and machine. When the house lets the wayward dog in, “[t]he dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience” (Bradbury 2). As the mice worry about the mess, the dog runs upstairs “hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was there” (Bradbury 2). The dog then tries to get at pancakes being made behind the kitchen door, only to die and “lay in the parlor for an hour” (Bradbury 2). After this, the mechanical mice it had previously inconvenienced went to work cleaning up the dead animal and depositing it piecemeal in the incinerator.

This treatment of the dog demonstrates how life is different from a machine. The dog goes searching for its family and is actually affected when it realizes that its family is gone. It changes its course of action to compensate for this lost priority. At this point, it just desperately wants food and dies hoping the kitchen will let it in. Life is passionate and adaptable. In contrast, when the dog tracks mud through the house, the mechanical mice, apathetic to the pain the dog endures, clean the mess, “angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience” (Bradbury 2). Machines only execute. Thus is the difference between Man’s slave and Man’s best friend.

Throughout the story, the reader is forced to deal with how the emptiness and sterility of the house make clear just how artificial this house’s kindness and loyalty are. At 4:30, the nursery’s television-screen-like walls come to life with animals, “yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance” (Bradbury 2). The imitation of life continues as the nursery simulates a fantastic biosphere, going into such incredible detail as to produce a “sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass” (Bradbury 2). This show designed to delight and bedazzle the children of the house goes on futilely. The house’s existence does not revolve around the entities that would reside within it. The house’s existence revolves around the clockwork of its programming.

Towards the end of the story, the house captures the spirit of the story as it reads “Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly…” (Bradbury 3). In these days without human life, the dog is the only thing that truly cares. The birds are free, the animals run rampant, and the machine just continues to execute its functions until it runs out of fuel. It doesn’t care. The machine’s recital of a poem is ironic in that it does it to gratify itself in the completion of an objective, but it has no way to understand or interpret what the meaning of poetry. The poem is wasted as pearls before swine.

Machinery is a great symbol of futility in this story. It serves no purpose. At the command of its masters, it eradicated its masters without any regard for the consequences. Bradbury sums up the action of the house as follows: “The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of religion continued senselessly, uselessly” (Bradbury 2). The very attributes of determination and loyalty that made the machine man’s ideal servant also made it the utensil of his suicide. The machine does not hold contempt for its human masters. It is simply apathetic.

Work Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” The Martian Chronicles. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985. 166-172. <http://www.elizabethskadden.com/files/therewillcomesoftrainsbradbury.pdf>