As Mr Mead likes long walks and reading; not television and media, he is considered to be the an outcast, Mr Mead walks everyday and sometimes wouldn’t come back until midnight; but one day he was stopped and taken by police. The police car takes him away to the mental hospital for regressive tendencies. Regressive means returning to an earlier or less advanced point in time, so when the police car says ‘to the psychiatric Centre for research on Regressive Tendencies.’ He is saying that Mr Mead is being taken to be analyzed at a psychiatric Centre for the fact that he is as considered to be crazy because he refuses to ‘keep up with the times’, in this case it being the media.
Bradbury compares the house to that of a graveyard, in saying that everything seems very cold and dead to him, with no light on in the house but that of a faint glimmer, like that of a firefly in the house. The house is zombie-like due to the fact that no-one in the house has to think about anything. When watching television, rarely do people think about what was seen. The society is stupefied by the television into being a zombie but and submitting to entertainment instead of trying to becoming more intelligent individuals by using the intellect that they were blessed with, and to better understand the world. This had made them zombies; trapped and destroyed there their lives.
‘He was within a block of his destination when the lone car turned a corner quite suddenly and flashed a fierce white cone of light upon him. He stood entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned but by the illumination, and then drawn towards it.’ Bradbury has compared the police light to that of a light that would attract and entrance a moth. Entrance by definition means an inability to function, so Leonard Mead had the inability to move as he started stared into the light of the police car, as if a moth would. Leonard was not expecting this to happen as he had been getting away with his constant walks at night for years and not been disturbed. After this he was trapped by the technology that surrounds surrounded him and forced to conform to what everyone else has had now become to consider a 'normal life'.
‘The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest.’ In this sentence Bradbury has compared the light that Leonard Mead has encountered to a pin holding a specimen at in a museum. Leonard Mead is stuck immobilised by the police like a lab specimen stuck by a metal pin. He is trapped by this light and at this point he realizes what the police have done, he realizes he has been trapped.
I conclude that Ray Bradbury’s use of insect images has shown that through technology we will eventually be trapped and destroyed. Only by realizing what we love right now about our lives, such as nature, can we be stopped from being indulged and trapped by technology, and have a more, richer life for that of ourselves and for those who come after us.
Jody Rogers
C7
