Summary of the There Will Come Soft Rains

Setting, plot, characters, dialogue, point of view, and theme are all basic elements of fiction. Ray Bradbury puts a little twist in characters to make this story more interesting. In “There Will Come Soft Rains”, there aren’t real human characters involved. Machines are introduced with ability to talk and act, but they don’t entirely fit the descriptions of characters because they don’t have personalities or abilities to make decisions. Even without characters that usually make up the plot and story, Ray Bradbury manages to make his story progress in interesting manners as if there were characters in action. It is very impressive and remarkable that the author was able create a story that engages the readers actively even without introducing a character.

Ray Bradbury starts his story with a sound of voice-clock repeating, “Today is August 4, 2026(259).” In this science fiction, Ray Bradbury basically predicts what will happen in our close future.  The amazing part of this work is that things Ray Bradbury uses in this story which were created by his imagination at that time are actually being created and used right now.  Automatic robots cleaner used, commonly in Korea, appear in this story as a robot mouse cleaner (260). There are other inventions in this story, like automatic cooker or self-protection system, that are about to take place in our own real world. I find it incredible that Ray Bradbury was able to predict the future so accurately and was able to create a very vivid picture of our own future.

The third reason I like “There Will Come Soft Rain” is because of the lesson that I can learn from it. In page 263, the machine reads a poem out loud to its owner, even though the owner is not present. The poem describes how the nature wouldn’t care if the humans all of a sudden disappeared. Ray Bradbury teaches us that we as humans have to take care of nature and he also shows how the world would be monotonous and mundane without the energy that humans bring to the world. When I was reading this story, it revealed to me the perfect plan of God: to create creative beings with personality and put them in charge of the World. This story depicted a clear picture of what it would be like if the human beings were absent from the World.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury has interesting elements, shows a peek of what will happen in our future, and gently warns humans beings to remind us that we have to take care of our environment.  “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a remarkable piece of literature in which Ray Bradbury has done an outstanding job of getting this warning across through an interesting story, and now it is our responsibility as human beings to prevent this story from becoming our reality.

The story begins by introducing the reader to a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans, and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do United States family could be assumed to have. The reader enters the text on the morning of August 4, 2026, and follows the house through some of the daily tasks that it performs as it prepares its inhabitants for a day of work and school. At first it is not apparent that anything is wrong, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a woman, a man, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon.

The house is described as standing amidst the ruins of a city; the leveled urban area is described briefly as emitting a "radioactive glow".^[1] The only thing left standing is the house, which continues to perform its duties unaware that the family is gone. At one point, further insight into the demise of the family is given when a tape recorder within the house recites a poem by Sara Teasdale called "There Will Come Soft Rains". The poem describes how the Earth's other living things, and implicitly nature as a whole, are unaffected by an event of human extinction that has occurred as the result of an unnamed disaster.

At ten o'clock p.m., the house is finally destroyed as well when a gust of wind blows a tree branch through the kitchen window, spilling cleaning solvent on the stove and causing a fire to break out. The house warns the family to get out of the building and tries shutting doors to limit the spread. The house also attempts to fight the fire, but its water reservoirs have been depleted after numerous days of cooking and cleaning without replenishment. The house burns to the ground except for one wall, which continues to give the time and date the following morning.

In the original Collier's story, the story's events take place in a deserted house in the city of Allendale, California, on April 28, 1985 (a year changed to 2026 in later printings). The title andmotif of the story, as outlined above, comes from Sara Teasdale's poem, "There Will Come Soft Rains", which had a post-apocalyptic setting inspired by World War I. The imagery of the poem is echoed and expanded in the story.