The Pedestrian tells the story of a man who moves as the world stands still. “To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. I had a vague recollection of enjoying The Pedestrian by the time I was through re-reading, but it was The Veldt that hit me like a sudden memory of last night’s bad dream just a paragraph into the story. When I began to dig back into Bradbury’s library of work this month, the titles stuck out as familiar, but I didn’t immediately remember the stories. I dig Fahrenheit as much as the next paranoid English major, but today I revisited two of Ray Bradbury’s shorter works: The Pedestrian and The Veldt, two works that I’d read in college for assignments. The parallels exist between reality and Bradbury’s foreboding tales of futuristic terror run far deeper than that.

That view, unlike Bradbury’s work, lacks nuance, though. It’s a comparison as easy as it is flawed, and it’s often used to critique our currently cultural shift toward inclusiveness. In fact, it’s mostly a single work that our modern world gets compared to: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In today’s social media-obsessed culture, where your opinion ain’t worth squat unless you tweet it out, it’s been noted – and tweeted, you bet – that we’re getting dangerously close to the dystopian future that sci-fi writers made careers out of prophesizing.

The pedestrian ray bradbury