The Veldt Analysis

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Imagine living in a house which did all of your chores for you—a house which helped tie your shoes, took care of your children, and even automated your showers—wouldn’t that be great? After all, we all want to have technology do our jobs in place of us, so that we could instead spend our time on having fun, right? Ray Bradbury, the author of The Veldt, certainly disagrees. His short story shows how relying on technology can make things go horribly wrong: when people get deprived of the technology they’re used to, they can end up getting so upset that they do things that they wouldn’t normally do. Like locking their parents in the same room as a pack of fierce, hungry lions. The Veldt starts off with a couple, George Hadley and Lydia Hadley—both of whom live in a futuristic, automated home named a “Happylife Home”—complaining about how one of the automated rooms in their home, the “nursery,” is acting somewhat unusually. It is eventually revealed that the nursery is actually a virtual reality…show more content…
They wanted the nursery more than they wanted their parents; Peter says that he hated his father: “I wish you were dead!” And the nursery, being able to read Peter’s mind, was more than eager to grant his wish. Soon, Peter finds a way to get his parents locked into the nursery, and the virtual lions within it—which have become real—mauled them to death. The kids appear to show no remorse over their actions, with Wendy even casually asking the psychologist if he wanted “a cup of tea.” Although there is no foreshadowing or in-text evidence that Wendy was trying to poison him with a poisoned cup of tea, I believe that it is reasonable to believe that this is the case, since if the psychologist understood what had happened—he most likely did—he would have wanted to shut down the nursery, which Wendy most likely didn’t

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