The Textual Afterlives of Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”
By Lindsay Damon
Summary
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury is a story about an energy-driven, futuristic world. The central family’s home is run by ultra-advanced appliances that replace human actions, seemingly making it easier for the family to function. The highlight of the house and the main focal point of the story is the nursery, a room that transforms into whatever the children want it to be. The story begins with the parents expressing concerns about the current form of the nursery — a vast African veldt, with everything from the hot sun to lions grazing on something off in the distance. The parents worry about the intensity of the room; they notice that vultures are circling the lion’s meal, and all of a sudden, the lions lunge after the parents. The parents run out of the room, escaping from the supposedly virtual creation of the nursery, and discuss “shutting off” their house and all the advanced technological appliances in it. After the family eats a dinner prepared by their dining-room table, the parents question the children about the nursery, but the children deny the existence of the African veldt. Later on, however, the father finds his wallet torn up by the lion’s teeth. When the children express anger and disagreement with the idea of shutting the nursery down, the parents bring in a psychologist, who says that the children have become dependent on the nursery. He tells the father that he has spoiled the children with the house, and with his threats to take the nursery or other household appliances away, the children are let down and angry. After a big fight between the parents and their children about shutting down the nursery, the children trap their parents in the African veldt, refusing to let them out. Without warning, the lions attack and devour the parents. The children, satisfied, offer the psychologist a cup of tea.
This story is a violent depiction of the future, but it is also one that is filled with energy afterlives. These energy afterlives ultimately lead to the death of the parents, due to the family’s dependence on technology that replaces typical human actions, such as cooking dinner or turning on the lights. Because the story is so focused on these technological advances, I was curious about how the energy afterlives help shape the short story. In my visualization, I analyzed the number of times that each appliance was mentioned and transformed this into a data-based architectural plan of the house.
The Visualization
In doing this visualization, I was curious about the amount of energy-dependent items mentioned and the frequency of such references. There were 19 items in the story that required energy: two vehicles (a helicopter and a rocket), 13 household appliances (the air closet, the heater, the dining room table, the stove, the voice clock, the shoe tier, lacer, and shiner, the bath, the scrubber, the rocking chair, the television, and the massager), and four elements of the house (the walls, the lights, the switches, and the nursery itself). To accurately represent the number of “nursery” mentions, I included all references to the words “nursery” and “room,” as long as “room” was referencing the nursery. I created two related visualizations with this analysis. I started by creating the tree map, shown first in the carousel above, which demonstrates the amount and frequency of energy afterlives in a simple way. After doing this, I decided that I wanted the visualization to be more relevant to the story, which led me to create the architectural floor plan. The floor plan visualization represents the data in the same way as the tree map, where the size of the colorful box corresponds to the frequency of mentions. Each energy afterlife is placed on the floor plan in a place where it could theoretically go inside the house.As expected, my visualization shows that the nursery was the most frequently mentioned energy afterlife in this story, with 54 mentions. After that, the walls were next with seven, and the dining room table, lights, and air closet (or air flue) all had three. The stove, the switches, and the bath had two references, and the rest of the appliances were just mentioned once. This analysis and visualization demonstrate two main things: while the nursery is the most dominant energy afterlife by far, there are a variety of appliances that are mentioned in the story. This finding shows how central energy afterlives are to Bradbury's text. The characters live in a world of energy afterlives — so many that their house is filled with and created out of afterlives that replace human behaviors.
This replacement of human behaviors is shown in my visualization. There are energy afterlives that replace human behaviors in nearly every room of the house, demonstrating how ubiquitous they are to the family. The physical layout of the architectural plan allows the reader to see how the house is made up of energy afterlives. One could argue that the house itself is an energy afterlife.
