Constant Change: Ray Bradbury's Depiction of Time in “All Summer in a Day,” “The Pedestrian,” and “The Fog Horn” Anonymous 11th Grade

There are many inevitable aspects of life that society attempts to suppress: heartache, loss, hatred.According to James Baldwin, it is an artist’s job to confront and “to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge” (Baldwin 1). In Ray Bradbury’s short stories, Bradbury exposes the inescapable truth of time through the development of his characters from naivety to awareness.

In Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day,” a young girl, Margot, changes as she struggles with the reality of living on Venus; a planet which ceases rainfall once every seven years. She moves to Venus at the age of four yet can still vividly recall sunshine. However, her classmates can not. Margot is aloof and refuses to associate with the other children at school. By doing so, she spurs her own isolation. As her classmates doubt the recurrence of sunshine, Margot remains optimistic. She proclaims to a group of peers, “…this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they know, the sun…,” but her beliefs are denied; her classmates shove and lock her into a closet (Bradbury 2). While Margot is trapped inside the closet, the sun comes out and the overjoyed children play outside. Only until raindrops reappear do Margot’s...