Exploring "The Veldt"

Exploring Bradbury’s “Veldt”

“The Veldt,” the first piece in Ray Bradbury‘s 1951 anthology, The Illustrated Man, speaks of a futuristic family of four who recently have purchased a residence with every electronic and mechanical luxury.   Their “happylife home” is the cutting edge of technology at the time and soon takes over every task that people normally perform for themselves.   Even parents, Lydia and George, find themselves feeling somewhat obsolete as caregivers to their two children, Peter and Wendy (we are not surprised by the choice of names as J.M. Barrie was one of Bradbury’s inspirations.)   The main focus of discomfort is the nursery room.   The nursery was designed as a virtual reality place space with television style walls which display whatever the children are thinking, dreaming, or imagining.
As the story opens, Lydia and George are somewhat uncomfortable as the nursery seems to be constantly showing an African Veldt or grassland with lions feeding on a fresh kill.   At first amused by the children’s interest in foreign lands, the parents eventually become unnerved at the thought of Peter and Wendy thinking so much about violent death; as well as the growing sense of detachment as the children spend more and more time in the nursery.   Through the disconcerting feelings experienced by the characters, Bradbury shows his own disquiet with burgeoning technology and the possibility it will break up the nuclear family.   Certainly this can be linked to the early fifties emergence of the television into suburban home life.
Bradbury spends the entire story developing a sense of alienation between each family member and especially the schism between parents and children.   He even alludes to the adults becoming nonentities due to their own desire to pamper themselves and their kids.   This can be seen as the juvenilization of adult authority figures, and it expresses Bradbury’s worry that with constant television watching would come degeneration of...