Analysis Essay On Technology In The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s, “The Pedestrian”, is a story that describes our future and how it will change our society over the years. In the story, the main character, Leonard Mead, has taken a walk every night for the past 10 years of his life. From what is written it is easy to infer that walking at night is not a common practice anymore because in paragraph 9 Bradbury says “ In the ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking.” This is probably due to all the technological advancements at the time where this story takes place.

During Mead’s walk he is stopped by a police car, this could mean during the time this story takes place walking is such an uncommon practice that it can raise suspicion to law enforcement. When the police car stopped and shouted orders at Mead, he noticed the voice from the car speaker was very metallic implying that it was a robotic sound or automated sounds and not an actual person. All of a sudden the Police car door flung open and Mead was asked to go in, all he was doing was just walking at night and he was being arrested. When he went in the police car he noticed nobody was in the driver seat and the car was driving itself so he asked where he was being taken to. The police car informed Mead that he was being taken to a psych ward, this was all for walking and Mead did nothing to deserve it. 

Ray Bradbury was definitely trying to imply that technology was taking over our society and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The reason Mead had never seen anyone walking at the same time as him in 10 years is because people are probably glued to their technology and entertainment from screens. Nobody was manning the police car either; it  was taken over by technological advancements which can also be dangerous as seen in the story where it makes a mistake and takes Mead to a Psych ward for walking. Overall it’s shown that Technology took over the year this story takes place in and there was nothing anyone could do about it because technology is the easier solution to almost everything and it is bound to take over someday