Style


 * Style**: reflects the choice, use and arrangement of words and sentence structures that create tone, voice and/or mood.

**Mood** - the general sense or feeling that the **reader** is supposed to get from the text.
Bradbury's Style

1. Differences between Bradbury and other sci-fi authors:
 * His extensive use of figurative language - similes and metaphors.
 * Uses sense imagery
 * Most sci-fi writers expand the awareness/ imagination of the reader; Bradbury, however, attempts to narrow the reader’s focus AND transforms all the complex, mysterious forces of a modern world into common items - familiar things.

2. He explores the topic: Childhood and the child in every man.
 * Bradbury places a lot of emphasis on themes relating to this topic.
 * He creates characters, setting and conflicts that explore the wonder of childhood, the terror of childhood’s loneliness, and the sadness of eventual death (as the boy becomes man).

3. **Bradbury views future man as a victim of technology**.
 * Man is destroyed by the very machines designed to aid him.
 * Our personalities (pride, prejudice, selfishness, greed) can lead to our destruction – WE DO NOT NEED AN ALIEN.

4. Bradbury has a fascination with death.

5. His stories are often compared to fables.
 * Characters represent ideas.
 * Some sort of lesson or moral is presented by the end.

6. He writes vignettes.
 * A brief picture or snapshot of life.
 * The setting is usually only a day or a few hours.

As you read the short stories for this unit:


 * Identify the style - tone and mood - of each short stories (do you find similar traits in the writings of Vonnegut and H.G. Wells?).
 * What other elements (discussed above) can you identify in these short stories?