There Will Come Soft Rains is a short story with no characters. Before you say it, yes you can characterize the objects and the dog, but for the most part there are no characters. The story is about an automated house in the year 2026. Despite the fact that everything around the house is nothing more than a charred wasteland, the automated house just keeps going. It prepares meals, cleans the house, and readies the car at set intervals. There are near the end of paragraph 11, the story tells us about a number of silhouettes of what is presumably the family that once lived in this house. Between the charred wasteland and these mirrors of what used to be, I’m going to infer that the world has ended. While there are a number of ways that a family can die while surrounded by a wasteland I would say that this apocalyptic event is nuclear war. And I’m not basing this guess off of the video. It was my first guess. I also found the ending to be symbolic to the message of the story. First, the story quotes a poem in page 3 which says something to the effect of, when man kills himself off nature will have a grand old time. Then shortly after that, a tree crashed through the house and lit it on fire. Despite the house’s best efforts to seal all air ways to suffocate this fire, sprayed whatever water reserves it has left, and using a chemical agent to mitigate the effects of the fire it just kept going. Page 4 started giving the fire and the automated house almost human characteristics. On page 4 paragraph 4 the story called the fire clever and paragraph 6 described wood support beams as bones. Eventually the fire won which is a symbolic middle finger from nature to civilization. Once the fire subsided the house chimed in once again. This time all it could do was say that it was a new day. After the destruction of the house the date changed from August 4, 2026 to August 5,2026. Even if this man made structure was destroyed, life marches on. And in the context of this story, by that I mean nature is still going and man does not.

I think I had a professor who was teaching environmental literature in this college who talked about a room in a building that he was working at. Either that or it was a high school teacher but that’s not the point. One of my teachers worked at a building where a door was closed for some years and was left locked. Eventually someone heard some noises coming from the other side and when they went to investigate it, the room had been conquered by pigeons. And by conquered I mean they got through a window and started nesting inside the room. From how it was described to me it was something around 30 to 50 pigeons inside. I don’t think he had an exact number on account of there were a lot of pigeons inside and that’s not normal. But 30 to 50 is how I pictured it in my head. An abandoned home and an abandoned room. I can believe this story because of that story that teacher told me. You leave a room alone for long enough and you can be sure that nature will try to reclaim it. An entire home will meet the same fate as that room.

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury is a short science fiction story that describes the events of what a house would do during the day. The house is being that performs various tasks on a schedule timing and it even talks and does different things for a family that would be living there. But in this story there is nobody living in the house and the house is just empty. Even though the house is empty it still continues and carries on performing various tasks.

In the story we see that there are no actual live characters other than the animals than come near the house and interact with it. Also there was a dog that the house was able to recognize which means that that dog could’ve been apart of the family that lived in that house. Basically the main character of this story would be the house because since the story revolves around it and it even performs actions and talks a little. According to the text it says “Who goes there? What’s the password?”(Bradbury, 2). The house notices and is able to sense the presence of organisms that come in range of the house and would ask who is that being and also the password to get into the house, which makes it seems that it can be protective of a family that would be living in that house.

Since the story revolves around a house that is built to serve a family by doing various tasks, it seems that the story takes place in a time or event where the human race was eliminated by some sort of epidemic which only leaves the house alone along with some living animals roaming around. According to the story it says: “The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruin gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.”(1). It shows that the population was wiped out because there is rubble around and it is also radioactive which means that there really can’t be signs of human life around because those are not conditions that they would be able to live in or survive.

As the house continues daily performing and functioning daily, it started to begin to fall apart. The wind had blown and crashed into the kitchen and started a fire which had started to burn everything. According to the story it says: ” The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs.”(3). The house tries to save itself from the fire by using water and other methods like using the cleaning mice. The fire ends up getting worse and spreading to every area around the house and burning away many objects. It also tampers with various mechanisms around the house like for example when it describes how the stove is producing breakfast foods at a higher rate than usual.

Afterwards as the fire than faded it left the house in ruins. At the end of the story it says how one wall was there and it voiced saying the date which was the next day afterwards when the story had started.

In the short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, is a story of a automated house that continues to run without any human intervention for a long time. It shows us one day of the daily routine of the automated house and how it cater to all the family members.

In this futuristic story, the machines and the robots in the house are set to do a certain task. One important machine that set every in motion is the clock, for example, the machine said “Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine! In the kitchen, the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh”(1). The clock in the house seems to be controlling the routine of the house and signal which machine to start up. The clock appears several of time throughout the story and its job is to manage the machines. The machines think that they are serving god, with the narrator saying,” The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing…But the gods had gone away”(2). The narrator is referring the house praying to something that does not exist or working for something that does not exist, which is the humans and the are refer to as gods.

The automated house was used by a family with each of their routine incorporated into the machine in the house. The family is consist of four people said by the narrator, “Two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk”(1). From the quote, it can be inferred that four people were living in the automated home, two were the parents and the other two were the children. The family also had a baby, as said by the narrator “The nursery walls glowed”(2). it was described in more detail in the story of the nursery, that the room was made for a baby. The dog in the family somehow survived just like the house, but the dog was malnourished.

As the story reaches its climax the machine and the robots start to show emotion like a human for the jobs they are programmed to do. When the dog enters and the robot mice have to clean up after him, the narrator said: “Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience”(2). The mice were given emotion because it shows us the reader of what the robot have to every single day, even though there is nothing to clean and once the dog came in the robot has to work out of their routine to clean up after the dog. Furthermore, the narrator compares the house to a human, saying “The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves reveal”(4). it seems the narrator want us to think that the house is alive. In the beginning of the story, the house does seem lively even without human performing all the tasks, but it always goes back to a depressing setting.

In the end of the story the narrator puts human emotions and characteristic into the automated house. As it dies in the flame the narrator want us to feel for the robots and the machines.