The Butterfly Effect in a Sound of Thunder
Some people say that the author of the story that im going to write about can tell the future because in the 1950’s he was able to know what technology will do to the future. His name is Ray Bradbury and he was born and raised in Waukegan, IL. Some of the Things Ray did for fun were read and write, he loathed technology even until his death on June 5th 2012 due to an undisclosed, long-term illness. The genre that he mostly wrote about was dystopian literature, dystopian writing is where is the vision of a society (usually opposite of ideal imagined) that is the opposite of ideal. A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution.
The story A Sound of Thunder is a story about the butterfly effect. There is a company called Time Safari INC in the story that lets people travel back in time to any point in history for $10,000. A man named Eckels decides to go back in time to hunt the Tyrannosaurus-Rex. When they go back in time and Eckels sees the dinosaur he freezes in shock and he runs off the path and steps in a bunch of mud. Then the workers make Eckels go and get the bullets out of the dinosaur. While on their way back to their time Eckels finds a dead butterfly on his boot.Then when they go back to there normal time and they notice that the sign for Time Safari INC is written in bad english, a different candidate won the election. Then the tour guide Travis shoots and kills Eckels.
The theme of this story is the butterfly effect. Bradbury thinks that the future will bring extremely advanced technology such as time traveling machines.”We might kill an important animal, a small bird, an insect, a flower even. Doing that could destroy an important link in a growing species.’ Travis says this on page 3 when they are in the machine going back in time. The butterfly effect is a theory stating that a small action in a certain point in time could have great consequences in the future. ‘All right,’ Travis continued, ‘say you accidentally step on one mouse here and it dies. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?’. Travis says this as they are going back in time and it’s the literal definition of the butterfly effect. He is saying that one small action such as killing a mouse could kill a whole family, or even worse end an entire species. Based off of my citations i think it’s fair to say that the butterfly effect is the theme of the story.
Bradbury uses figurative language to foreshadow what will happen later in the story, and to reference where he was born.’Makes you think. If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He’ll make a fine President of the United States”. Eckels says this while talking to an offical at Time Safari INC. Bradbury uses irony to foreshadow Deutscher winning the election at the end of the story.’Every hunter that ever lived would love to be us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois. ” Eckels says this while they are going back in time, and Bradbury uses this simile to reference where he was born and raised. I like how Bradbury uses figurative language in this story.
I loved this story, I thought it was very detailed and creative. One of the things that I liked most about “A Sound of Thunder” was its foreshadowing, for example when Eckels talks about the election and and how he was glad that Keith won, and then later in the story Deutscher ended up winning the election. The theme of this story is the butterfly effect, I think the theme of A Sound of Thunder was fascinating. I thought it was very interesting that Bradbury was from Illinois like me. I’m usually not interested the dystopian genre but this story was different from other dystopian stories. I disliked how the story ending with Eckels dying, instead showing the full consequences from Eckels mistake. Although I disliked the ending of the story I love the concept of time travel which in turn made me love this story. I would rate this story a 9 out of 10.
