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| From SUNfiltered |
You'll notice the influence of "A Sound of Thunder" on this blog, and my thoughts: the sign that we read in the beginning is not the same one we read in the end, and it is because of the actions of the reader.
I'm struck by the way his opening sentence shows us what we need to know. I'm struck by the rhythm he uses in the short paragraph that starts, "First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night," suggesting what it might be like to time travel. I'm struck by a later sentence that communicates, in its syntactical repetition, the complication of the subject of time and influence: "Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue." Finally, I'm struck by the fact that in this story, Bradbury takes us first into the future and then into the past, showing how our choices affect our world. It's thunderous, a matter of life and death.
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ReplyDeleteTo start off, I’d like to jump to the middle/end of A Sound of Thunder and compliment the description of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. To choose a line in particular: “Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger.” This entire paragraph really made me question whether or not Ray Bradbury had some form of time travel to have seen this for himself. In other words, his description of something that none of us have seen was very believable.
ReplyDeleteThe men hunting the Tyrannosaurus Rex have a noticeable change in emotion from before they see the dinosaur to after they see it. Their emotions clearing transform from excitement to fear rather quickly and Bradbury does an excellent job of showing us this change in emotion rather than telling us. Beforehand, the men are asking many questions out of anxiety, but are still joking about the butterfly effect with the tour guide. At the point that they see the dinosaur before them, the mood changes and they immediately want to run for cover. As previously stated, Bradbury could have easily said, “the men were excited, but when they saw the dinosaur they were scared,” but he did a much better job of letting us figure that out through his characters’ actions.
Can you imagine knowing that you are the person who changed the course of time? The concept is almost overwhelming to me. Everything I know right now at this very moment could be changed by the unnecessary need for some man to hunt a dinosaur. Does this seem ridiculous to anyone else? Is man’s desire to overpower beasts more great than the possible destruction of time now? That risk seems too large to take. If time is that fragile, it should not be tampered with. I like the references to sounds of thunder throughout the short story. Ending with a sound of thunder is so on key, abruptly ending the story as if that’s that. I feel like this approach truly sends the message across.
ReplyDeleteThe way Bradbury writes, in my opinion, is phenomenal. At some points, he could have an entire paragraph explain an idea, yet the one-sentence descriptions are what got me the most. “A touch of the hand and this burning world, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself.” I read this line and was so shocked by its power. Instead of just stating that changing one this could change the world, he almost writes it poetically, and to me, it captured the large risk of time travel. I also love his portrayal of Eckels. I can imagine him becoming so terrified of the large beast which is a Tyrannosaurus that all he can mutter are words of negativity. “Nightmare,” “We were fools to come. This is impossible,” and “I miscalculated, that’s all. And now I want out,” all seem so void of actual fear, allowing me to believe that the character is so shocked, so past the point of fear, he can only speak without feeling.
While this isn’t the focus of the story, or the focus of this exercise, I’d like to mention, how much I enjoyed the world(s) that Bradbury built. Despite being only a few sentences, like mentioning the faults of the candidate who didn’t get elected, it really shows the character of the cultures (and the political leanings of the characters). This is a great way of showing the opposing characters of the world rather than if someone had just said, “I’m a democrat/republican. Thank God a democrat/republican won.” In addition, while this is more of a stylistic thing, than a showing and telling thing, I really like how Bradbury chose to capitalize ‘Escapes’. It made me wonder, if people who were dissatisfied with their current time had tried to go back to a different time, and probably caused disastrous effects. If so, maybe Eckles wasn’t the first person (in a manner of speaking) to accidentally change history, and that (at least in the context of the story) people are constantly going back and accidentally changing history, at least in small ways.
ReplyDeleteSwitching gears back to the actual exercise, I love how much Bradbury put us in the heads of the characters. Instead of telling us that the characters where anxious about going back to the past, he lets the character’s actions speak for themselves. He could have easily told us that Eckles tried to talk himself up when he was nervous, but it was much more effective to hear him tell the others about all the different wild animals he’d shot (even if I don’t necessarily believe him), and jokingly point his gun at dinosaurs that weren’t marked. At the end of the story, while describing the uncanny feeling Eckles had before he figured out that the world had changed literally gave me chills, because even though I had never had that exact feeling, it was described to particularly that I knew exactly what he was talking about, even if Bradbury never said “Eckles had an uncanny feeling that something was wrong”.
I think Ray Bradbury enables his readers to time travel along with Eckels- I’m talking about the part in the beginning of the story where Eckels is looking around the office and imagining how the simplest of occurrences, like the hum of a machine or the flicker of a switch, could be altered by what we as humans do/have done in the past. He includes this long sentence starting with “Out of chars and ashes…” and continues it all the way to “the time before the beginning.” The imagery that he uses to show the reversal of life as we know it- “wrinkles vanish” and “suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts” allow the reader to imagine what life would be like if we could go back in time and step off the Path like Eckels did.
ReplyDeleteOne other interesting sequence that Bradbury includes is when the travelers are returning to the future, he mentions the years 1492, 1776, and 1812, all of which were years of significance in our country. Is he including these for effect, reminding his readers that one action ultimately alters the outcome of another? Or are these just the first years that come to mind? Maybe one day we can find out his reasoning behind this.
The way Ray Bradbury writes in “A Sound of Thunder” is beautifully heavy. Sometimes to call a writer’s style heavy is to say that it’s dense or unapproachable, but the way I mean it here is that his language is weighed down with the whole world itself. There is an honest to God weight that he bestows upon each reader, and it’s as if it’s our duty to not let any of it escape (while we read). I’m thinking of lines like “Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them” or one of my favorite lines in the whole story “Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever.” As I got further into the story, these didn’t even feel like sentences anymore. Instead it just felt like a continuous, heart-stopping stream of story. I know that the story I’m reading is really good when I lose track of the punctuation, the format, etc. and when the story has moved from the page to being played out directly inside my head.
ReplyDeleteBurroway’s chapter “Showing and Telling” relates well to the quality of story-telling within “A Sound of Thunder”. In one section called “Significant Detail” Burroway states, “Details are the stuff of persuasiveness” (22). Bradbury attests to this himself, for how else does he expect his readers to not only believe in this surreal world but want to understand it as well? Bradbury shows us a world where time travel has become attainable and as a result causes hunger and greed (to hunt). I believe in this temporary world of his because of those intensive details. So I agree with Burroway. A good story is one which shapes the ‘world’ of that story through vivid detail, and Ray Bradbury does this consistently through “A Sound of Thunder”, through his enthusiasm and gift for detail.
The way Bradbury described and constructed his world in this story is something I really enjoyed. Time travel is something that's so out-there and hard to imagine but Bradbury really made me feel like it was something real and tangible, which made the danger of accidentally changing time that much more frightening. I agree with pretty much everyone when I say that I could really picture the emotions Bradbury was showing us. Even just the line "'Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?' Eckels felt his mouth saying" shows emotion. Eckels is barely even aware he's saying these things, which serves to show the reader his nervousness and apprehension.
ReplyDeleteBesides just the showing of emotion, I especially enjoyed the imagery. The description of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, like Sarah said, just sounded so real. I could certainly imagine that creature in my head while I was reading that paragraph. I especially liked the lines "The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning." The sentences are so short but they really evoke the feeling of relief the men must have had after the dinosaur had finally died.
Bradbury does a phenomenal job taking his reader with him on the character’s journey into the past. The concept of time travel to me is interesting and scary. As a society I feel like a majority of people at one point or another have wanted to go back and experience something in their past, or just enjoy a piece of history. Of course there are always the conscience to our actions. I think Bradbury does a great job pointing out that we can’t have both. The thought of going back in time seems so interesting and foreign. The description of Eckels excitement and eagerness to enter this old but new piece of time for him was more than enjoyable to read. The images and descriptions that Bradbury writes are very vivid. “The Tyrant Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand sand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself id not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.” Like Sarah mentioned above, I too wonder how Bradbury illustrated such an image for never really being able to time travel himself.
ReplyDeleteThis story spoke to me on the level of learning from ones mistakes, and realizing that although we think we want something we may not be ready, or even able to handle it. Eckels was so excited to go back to this point in time. He felt he needed to make that kill. But when he was faced with actually shooting the creature he found he couldn’t. I think this is why we can’t go back and view history. Maybe we weren’t supposed to view it to begin with.
The way Bradbury wrote this story was fascinating. I was immediately drawn into the story by the second paragraph, which was filled with words that gave me many different images. “Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fl y back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts…” The images he used were vivid and specific.
ReplyDeleteBradbury was able to expand simple ideas into huge paragraphs that gave us deeper insight, which I think is brilliant. I also enjoyed how at least half of the story was told through dialogue. We didn’t need to be told the whole story by a narrator. Important points of the story were included in dialogue. For example, we were given the explanation that the killing of one single mouse could affect the future of the planet Earth and society. The use of language, dialogue, and pattern (which I noticed in the beginning as Catherine pointed out), made the story ten times more powerful than what any average writer could have made it.
What interested me the most about Bradbury's story was his use of words. The way he used the descriptions to show rather than tell what was occurring throughout the action of the story really drew the reader in. One particular passage that stood out to me was the description of the T-Rex on pg. 213: "It came on great, oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half the trees, a great, evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest." The contrast between the "delicate" claws and the sheer size and "evil god" appearance of the T-Rex is very vivid as well as an interesting combination.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sydney that the way that Bradbury tells the story more through action and dialogue than a narrator simply saying what happened provides the reader with the crucial information that they need to know but are not disconnected from the action of the story. Also, in the chapter "Showing and Telling," Burroway emphasizes the the difference between prose for poets and writers, and how rhythm can enhance the meaning if it is "sensitively used." I think that Bradbury makes good use out of rhythm, and that his prose flow smoothly and clearly, making the action of the story clear to the reader.
Bradbury excels at packing a powerful punch into a few words. This story isn't long, and yet within the first couple of paragraphs I found myself already immersed in the world Bradbury had created. I especially loved the way that little details, which at first I thought were being used to facilitate my immersion, ended up functioning as a measure of how severely Eckels messed things up. Too often, especially in television shows, items that will become important later on are easily picked out, the foreshadowing too blatant. Here, Bradbury slipped it in without my noticing.
ReplyDeleteNot only was this weighty narrative brought to life by the details Bradbury included, but also by the characters, most notably Eckels and Travis. The way Eckels behaves when facing down his T-Rex seems so realistic. I can totally understand how one may feel excited at the idea of bringing down the king of the dinosaurs, but immediately regret the decision when facing one. The way he goes from terrified, to emotionless is what does it for me. Eckels becomes so overwhelmed that he just shuts down and finds his legs on auto-pilot. Bradbury's descriptions of Eckels in that moment are a perfect example of showing something to much greater effect than telling would have had.
“Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.
'Eckels!'
He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.”
I read that and I know the kind of fear Eckels has. Eckels isn't just scared, he's so horrified that he has entirely shut down. This ability to show such vivid emotion is what really sells the story to me.
Bradbury engaged me as a reader throughout ‘A Sound of Thunder’ by including a great amount of detail, showing and not telling, and using interesting metaphors.
ReplyDeleteOne example of Bradbury’s use of details is the scene in which the hunters first arrive in the jungle. “Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and old sea salt, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.” In this sentence, Bradbury incorporates three senses- hearing, smell, and sight, as well as an eerie metaphor (flowers the color of blood).
I was also able to experience the emotions Bradbury’s characters were feeling because Bradbury included scenes in which he showed the reader, rather than told. For instance, “Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff.” The actions that Eckels displayed in this scene helped me to infer that Eckels was nervous to face the T-Rex.
The metaphor that Bradbury used to describe the T-Rex’s death was gruesome to picture. “It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight.” I felt that the image of a massive T-Rex with steam pouring from its body like a wrecked locomotive or steam shovel was an interesting, yet still believable comparison.
I think what needs to be taken away from this short story is the graphic scenery that Bradbury wants the reader to focus on. He draws on a basic painting of the real world and then he continues like an artist to paint a very detailed image for the reader to us. As I read the book I could actually feel the heat of the Jungle and the smell of the swamp.
ReplyDeleteAlso by posting it in a somewhat modern day era you can somewhat connect to the main characters and the feeling of what they are going through. The use of some political overtones by having the Presidents poster outside the time travel business can invoke feelings that are quite similar to the political atmosphere of the real world. And by reading about it makes you think of our own political system and how it works.
Lastly by using a poetic ryhming scheme in the story you get in a rythem reading the book. It shows a true master at work and makes you want to consider trying it in your own work
After reading this story, I couldn't help but think of “The Twilight Zone.” As a kid, and certainly now, I would always marvel at how the simple plots would be able to evoke so much thought and imagination. I can see how Bradbury must have been a clear influence on Rod Serling as this story is much in the same fashion as the show. As someone who truly appreciates the science fiction genre, the thing about it that impresses me the most is not the spectacle or even the scope of the story. But rather that at the core is usually a study of human nature. This is undoubtedly the case in “A Sound of Thunder” which has helped define the science fiction genre as it is known today.
ReplyDeleteWhat also makes this story so riveting is that all of the characters are flawed yet somehow relatable. It's easy to get frustrated with Eckels yet the reader understands his actions. Travis too seems out of line at the end, yet his anger with Eckels makes sense. Even though we can suspect how it's going to end, it still has a large impact on the reader. Bradbury is more than just a talented writer and storyteller. His language, complemented by the imaginative scope of his stories, is enough to draw the readers in and keep them intrigued through the end. After reading “A Sound of Thunder” I know I will look for more of his stories to read and admire. What truly makes a “Sound of Thunder” worthwhile to me is, as referred to above, it is a short, simple story yet the scale of it is the size of the dinosaur (sorry, I couldn't resist). It shows how rich writing and a clear focus can lead to a story for the ages.