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All Summer in A Day by Ray Bradbury
The Nonlinear Structure of the Narrative
Ray Bradbury’s structure of the narrative is nonlinear in the story. His consideration to put use his nonlinear ideas is not about time, but about the world around his characters. However, on another level, the time is also ambiguous about a distant future with mysterious life patterns on another, unknown planet. Focusing on the writer’s nonlinear background, space-travelling is a common technique he uses to convey the unreal themes (Tench 49). In this short story, his background makes a shift from Earth to Venus. With his well-known imagery technique, he makes his reader so accustomed to Venus and its inhospitable climate that the reader begins to desire to look at the sun. He takes us to the jungles of Venus from the real jungles using his nonlinear construction of the world in which his characters reside. His dark world and its pale inhabitants switch our imaginations into a new background. The author sets our emotions deeply hurt when the sun rises, and Magrot is confined to the closet. The psychological relief occurs when the sun on Venus shines, and the reader can see yellow sunlight peering through the branches of the tree (Tech 51). All this becomes possible by Bradbury’s extensive mastery over nonlinear backgrounds and space travels. He is successful in portraying an unknown and mysterious world as a real and identified.
The Writing Style and Conventions Followed by the Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s writing style is somewhat between dry and poetic. The reader finds a lot of metaphorical examples and broad imagery in his writing style. On the other hand, his inclination to support the descriptions with important details creates dry style on a few occasions. Another noticeable thing, here, is that the great descriptions with long details also reflect the author’s grip on imagery, leaving the thought engaged in the products of his vision(Gale 47). There are various metaphors, smilies, repetitions and other literary devices used by the author to keep the reader hooked. For example; the sun looks like ‘penny’ as told by Magrot in All Summer in A Day. Besides, the frequent repetition of the anticipation of the sun rising among desperate students begets irresistible curiosity among the reader.
The literary convention, a reader, always confronts when reading Bradbury, is fantasy. Though he includes more than a few glimpses of the science-fiction genre in his works, he rejects to be called the follower of this literary convention. However, his world-building, characterization and themes manifest his singular vision and the deliberate invention of other planets, people, their sufferings and expectations (Bradbury 87). In, All Summer in A Day, the unhealthy school children on planet Venus in the wait of a phenomenal incident of their life – sunrise – and getting jealous of Magrot only because she has seen sun many times in her life depict a rare idea of misery and compulsion leadin...