We then find out he is a psychiatrist. When he opened the chamber door and stepped in, the prisoner smiled and said ‘Go away’, the psychiatrist was shocked by the smile. The psychiatrist tells the prisoner that he is here to help him, and then realized that there was something wrong with the room. The prisoner then says to him:
‘If you’re wondering why it’s so quiet in here, I just kicked the radio to death.
The doctor thought to himself that the prisoner was violent. The prisoner knew exactly that he was thinking that and said:
“No, only to machines that yak-yak-yak.’
The psychiatrist asked the prisoner for his name:
‘You’re Mr. Albert Brock, who calls himself The Murderer?’
The fact he calls himself ‘The Murderer’ is interesting because at this point we do not know that he only destroys electrical items, for all we know he could be a mass murderer.
Brock nodded, and then detached the wrist radio from the doctor’s arm. He put it in his teeth and heard it crack. Brock then went on to describe how he destroyed a telephone.
‘Fine. The first victim, or one of the first, was my telephone. Murder most foul. I shoved it in the kitchen Insinkerator! Stopped the disposal unit in mid-swallow. Poor thing strangled to death. After that I shot the television set!’
At this point it becomes obvious that Brock despises electrical items and that he is on a personal vendetta against them and won’t rest until he has destroyed all the electrical items that pass before him. The imagery he uses in the quote above is interesting, as it is very detailed. Other examples of this are below:
“Hey, Al, thought I’d call you from the locker room out here at Green Hills. Just made a sockdolager hole in one! A hole in one, Al! A beautiful day. Having a shot of whiskey now. Thought you’d want to know, Al!” Convenient for my office, so when I’m in the field with my radio car there’s no moment when I’m not in touch. In touch! There’s a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices.”
“‘It frightened me as a child. Uncle of mine called it the Ghost Machine. Voices without bodies. Scared the living hell out of me. Later in life I was never comfortable. Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn’t want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some stone cold fish of a voice all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality.
The sentences in the two quotes above are short, but dramatic. One of them is only three words, but all the sentences still give a wide range of detail. He uses a lot of describing words, which gets the message across about how he feels with regards to electrical items very well. It’s hard to believe in this day and age that anyone could be so against electrical items but he clearly feels very strongly about it.
Mr. Brock refers to two songs he likes during the story:
“‘As the old song goes: Don’t Care What Happens To Me!’” He hummed it.
“‘ Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan song – “I’ve Got It on My List, It Never Will Be Missed”
I find it very strange that Mr Brock likes any form of music. Earlier on in the passage he kicked the radio to death and he has probably destroyed many Hi-Fi’s in his time.
Everything taken into consideration, I do not agree to a great extent that Ray Bradbury is presenting a view of the 21st century in his short story, ‘The Murderer’. The majority of people in the 21st century today are happy with modern technological items. Anywhere you go, you’re bound to see people with mobile phones. A very high amount of people own a computer and virtually everyone owns a TV.
It is hard to believe that anyone in this day and age would go around kicking radios to death, shove a telephone into a sink or shoot the television set. Mr Brock is a person who definitely likes living in the past, and although some people don’t like or own televisions and telephones, they would not go out of their way to destroy them. For these reasons I do not believe Ray Bradbury presents an accurate image of the 21st century.
