"There Will Come Soft Rains" SG Questions & Answers

A big, empty house; it is August 4, 2026 in Allendale, California.

The house can talk; it makes breakfast, rings the clock, weather box, dishwasher, opens garage door, and reads important dates or messages. The family lived a scheduled life.

The people actually performing the functions the house is saying.

The house is set by itself; it has a radioactive glow.

The family probably died by nuclear bomb; it is the future, so the houses may have been invented to perform functions to make the lives of the families easier. It happened quickly bc you can see the silhouettes of the family when the nuclear bomb hit.

The family dog is still alive; he is skin and bones, and covered in sores; a lot of time has most likely passed. He dies.

It makes breakfast, cleans the house, opens the door, shuts the windows, card game set up, the nursery looks like a real safari, the house reads to them, etc.

A A B B C C D D E E F F -called rhyming couplets; alliteration- repetition of consonants at beginning of word: "...feathery fire..." "...whistling whims..."

In the poem, it says that Spring will still come, and never know that humans are gone. Nothing is left; mankind is gone. Nature will not care that humans are gone. Personification: "Spring herself when she woke at dawn..." "...frogs are singing..."Similarly, the story is of a house that does not know its family is gone, and continues to perform its normal functions.

A tree falls and spills a cleaning spray that catches on fire on the stove.

Bradbury uses a lot of personification; "...wind blew and sucked upon the fire" "It fed up Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls" "...the fire was clever..." Simile: "...heat snapped mirrors like the brittle ice..."

The voices kept yelling for help, and that there was a fire. The stove was making too much of everything. The house was frantic and panicked.

Even though the house was burned, everything else continues on, and even the last wall of the house continues saying the date and doing its normal, everyday function. The only wall standing keeps saying, "Today is August 5, 2026..."

We don't need each other to live if we have technology. Technology can be dangerous. Technology can separate us. The same technology the we enjoy could kill us. Life goes on without us. We're replaceable by technology.

The house is the main character in the story; this is unique because it's an object, not a person. In some ways it is human because it does all the things that humans do.