Themes In All Summer In A Day

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian story, “All Summer in a Day,” takes place on Venus—a planet where it rains all of the time. Margot, a recent arrival on Venus, remembers what the other children cannot. Grieving the loss of the sun, she remembers its beauty and warmth. The other children are jealous that she even remembers. This conflict creates a sad situation for all. Ray Bradbury creates the theme that when people cannot get over their own pain, they wind up hurting others and he illustrates this by using sentence variety and description.

Jealousy and the pain that results from it shines through the story as a central issue impacting all characters. When people cannot get over their own pain, they hurt others is a theme demonstrated by the characters’

This fuels the jealousy and resentment in the classroom. For example, Margot keeps mentioning her experience with the sun in front of the other children. She writes poems about the sun; she keeps telling stories of what it feels like. This is significant because she is not aware of the others’ feelings about the sun. She cannot tell that what she is doing could be seen as bragging which hurts the class indirectly. She is completely wrapped up in her own past experiences with the sun and is somewhat grieving over her loss of it. This shows Margot’s pain. Also, Margot does not look at the other children or talk to them during recess. She actually refuses to speak to another kid when he talks to her; she will not play any of their games. Bradbury writes, “If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved” (156). This is important because it shows how Margot keeps herself apart from the other children and she keeps talking about the

Bradbury took a specific moment in the story and illustrated it with precise details to create intensity. The long sentence, “They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door,” shows the students almost not knowing what they were doing, rushing through their actions (158). They are caught up in their jealousy and do not seem to see how their actions are hurting Margot. Bradbury uses this long sentence to show how out of control the children’s jealousy has become, as they take away the one thing that Margot craves. His sentence structure is not the only way he uses craft to develop this idea. The description and detail in the story also show the children’s pain. Bradbury explains that while they have never seen the sun, the children dream of it every night. They dream of gold and yellow and warmth—“but then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone” (155). This line shows the contrast between Margot’s experience and that of the other children, and makes their world of dreary rain even more painful. Although some may argue that this description is simply to allow the reader to sense exactly what kind of