Summary Of The Veldt

The Veldt and Reliance Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi short story, “The Veldt” follows the Hadley family, Lydia and George Hadley and their children, Wendy and Peter, who live in a special high-tech home that does every chore and task for them through automated machinery. The house features a room--the nursery--that takes the form of any desired imagined setting of the user within it in realistic, 4-dimensional holographic images all around them. The story opens to reveal that Wendy and Peter spend a dubious amount of time in the room and George and Lydia worry of this; resulting in an attempt to pull them away from the nursery. The children ultimately kill their parents in response to this. “The Veldt” largely revolves around Wendy and Peter Hadley’s

Early on, the two parents have already shown strong concern regarding it. The author states, “”George, I wish you’d look at the nursery. ...What’s wrong with it? ...I don’t know. …Well, then…I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.”” (Bradbury, 1) When George and Lydia enter the room, it remains set to the image of the African Veldt (a vast grassland in inner South Africa. It hosts many of Africa’s largest land-based animals). It is later revealed that the two parents often hear screaming from the room, which they understood were the lions hunting something their children have imagined, as Wendy and Peter do not often leave the room. Their parents become apprehensive of their children’s reliance on the image of the Veldt. They contemplate ceasing the use of the nursery and all the house’s electronics with it. Because to George and Lydia, “it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa.” (Bradbury, 4) This shows the parents’ view and concern on the nursery, and their concern. They fear the nursery may be harming the children in an addictive trance, which leads to them later wanting to take it away from the