28 pages • 56 minutes read
Ray BradburyThe Pedestrian: A Fantasy in One Act
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Pressure to Conform to Social Norms
The pressure to conform to social norms is seen in “The Pedestrian” when Mr. Leonard Mead is sent to a psychiatric center for the simple action of walking through the city at night. People in his society are expected to be home at night with their families, glued to repetitive programs on their viewing screens. Mead has no wife or viewing screen, and he enjoys being out in the world, using his senses and reflecting on others’ choices.
Mead’s non-conformity is humble and unobtrusive. In fact, since he has never met anyone else walking at night, it’s possible that no one even knows he is breaking social expectations. Nevertheless, his deviation is seen as incomprehensible. When the police car asks what he is doing and Mead says he has been walking, the robot responds with incredulity. It demands to know more: “Walking, just walking, walking? […] Walking where? For what?” (21). The repetition of the question indicates that Mead’s answer seems unreasonable to the law enforcement official, and a later question confirms this perspective. The robot asks if there is an air conditioner in his home, as if walking must have some practical excuse, such as escaping the heat.
Bradbury’s diction supports the idea that Mead’s choice to be different is unthinkable in his society. When the robot policeman learns that Mead doesn’t have a viewing screen, its inquiry is followed by “a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation” (21). The word “crackling” calls to mind electricity. This gives the reader the impression that this tension is strong enough to spark. People are typically accused of crimes or harmful behavior, so the use of the word “accusation” suggests that the choice not to watch television is seen as deviant to the point of unlawfulness.
Mead’s punishment emphasizes Bradbury’s point about the pressure to conform to society’s norms. After ordering Mead to get into the car’s jail cell, the police car says, “if you had a wife to give you an alibi […] But—” (22). This comment implies that the “crime” of walking at night instead of watching television at home is compounded by not being married. Mead might have been let go if he had followed the social expectation of being married, but his “failure” to do so doomed him. Mead is not only going to a psychiatric hospital for not conforming, but he is also going to a “research” facility. The fact that he is to be both punished and researched gives more weight to the author’s point that, in this society, nonconformity is seen as so wrong that it defies understanding. One can assume that the point of the research is to understand the source of this apparently deviant behavior so it can be prevented or identified in others.
The Dangers of Technological Advancement
Many of Bradbury’s stories include cautionary tales about technological advancement. In “The Pedestrian,” he highlights these dangers through the descriptions of people’s viewing habits and the impersonal nature of law enforcement in a futuristic society.
The role of television is key to Bradbury’s argument. Not only does it keep everyone except Mead inside at night, but it also essentially turns them into zombies:
Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now, he thought, continuing his fancy. The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them (20).
By writing that the television viewers “sit like the dead” and describing their homes as “tombs,” Bradbury suggests that the mindless content of their screens has sucked the life out of them. When he describes the light as “touching their faces but never really touching them,” the reader can infer that Bradbury feels television doesn’t touch people’s souls, activate their imaginations, or force them to think critically like reading does. Mead’s descriptions of the programs enforce this idea because everything he mentions is part of a well-worn pattern—the heroic Cavalry soldier, quiz shows, and slapstick comedy.
Bradbury further develops the theme of The Dangers of Technological Advancement by revealing near the end of the story that Mead has been stopped by a police car with no one inside. This may be a surprise to the reader, but it isn’t to the protagonist, who observes that “as he had expected, there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all” (22). By having a form of artificial intelligence interrogate and incarcerate the protagonist, Bradbury warns that technology could both take over human tasks and put humans in danger. The idea of artificially intelligent law enforcement comes across as particularly frightening due to the rigidity that Bradbury uses to describe it. This prompts the reader to imagine how a simple mistake, misunderstanding, or unintended slip could lead to catastrophe by checking a negative box for an automatic judge.
Taken together, both television and artificial intelligence are dehumanizing influences in this story: The former takes away people’s ability to think and the latter makes decisions about their freedom based on a pre-programmed algorithm with no sense of nuance or empathy.
The Horrors of Repressive Government
In “The Pedestrian,” the government appears only as a shadow, but it is clearly a frighteningly repressive entity. The government itself is only ever mentioned when Mead reflects that since 2052, “the election year,” the police force had been cut from three cars to one (19). The police car itself is the only concrete government representative in the story. However, the police car’s actions show that the government has total control over citizens’ lives. The car stops Mead in the street, interrogates him, and sends him to “the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies” with no due process, trial, or oversight (22).
This incarceration without trial hints at the many unjust incarcerations and murders committed by repressive regimes. The idea that a robot did this is even more frightening, since it indicates that the people in power have programmed their police to make judgments for them. Citizens of Mead’s society don’t even have the opportunity to appeal to a human who might have feelings, common sense, or the ability to respond to nuanced situations.
The title of the center where Mead is to be committed resembles accusations that might have been made by the dictators of Nazi Germany or the Communist USSR. Regression is the opposite of progress, so the use of the word “regressive” suggests that anyone who stands in the way of the government’s definition of progress is expendable. What is more, if someone only has to have a “tendency” to be “regressive,” then that person doesn’t even have to do anything against the law to be imprisoned. A tendency might be a bias or a possibility of a future action, but it is not an act in itself. That means that the government is willing to imprison people for thought crime or for just considering dissent.
Finally, it is telling to note that Mead is never actually accused of breaking a specific law. The robot questions his actions and motives but never says he was doing something that was explicitly illegal. In fact, when Mead protests, “I haven’t done anything,” the police car doesn’t argue; it simply says “get in” (22) If a government doesn’t even need a legal pretext to arrest a citizen, then that government has total power over people’s lives, and if a person can be arrested without breaking any written laws, how could a person possibly keep themselves safe and free? In such a situation, a person might not even know what they could or couldn’t do, subjected to guess at the whims of their rulers.
The harsh, arbitrary, and immediate punishment that Mead receives for walking at night may include a dash of hyperbole, but it is a potent reminder of the many injustices committed by controlling regimes in Bradbury’s time and in the years that followed.
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