“…The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton …”:A Postmodern Reading of Ray Bradbury’s “The Will Come Soft Rains” Anonymous College

Ray Bradbury’s “The Will Come Soft Rains” is a science fiction that focuses on house that is purely ran by technology. Some of the automated activities that can be performed by the house include: waking the occupants; issuing alerts on meal times, preparing meals, cleaning utensils, issuing a schedule for the important activities of the day; cleaning the house, keeping out the invaders, and painting the house among others. The house stands on its own because the entire city has been destroyed by a “radioactive glow”. Eventually, the house is destroyed by an uncontainable fire; the mechanization proofs to be ineffectual. “The Will Come Soft Rains” is a postmodern story that utilizes pastiche, intertextuality, paranoia, hyper reality, and metafiction.

The first postmodern style in “The Will Come Soft Rains” is pastiche which entails integration of science fiction and poetry. An example of science fiction is the automated kitchen that can prepare breakfast without human intervention. Ray Bradbury writes, “in the kitchen breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.” The...