The Veldt Critical Essay

Paragraph- “The Veldt” Theme In the short story, “The Veldt”, written by Ray Bradbury reveals the odds by creating a machine that only allows children to detach emotionally from their parents and their loss of innocence. Lydia and George Hedley live in a Happy life home a technological marvel that automatically tends to their every need which dresses them, cooks the food, brushes their teeth, and even rocks them to sleep. The house also contains a high-tech nursery. The nursery turns into any scenery the children imagine about in that room.

Children are usually naive and silly. But in this story children lose their innocence gradually because they feel abandoned and alienation. The children feel abandoned by their parents when they were left in the care of a technological baby sitter which led them to lose their innocence. When George and Lydia realized that there is something wrong with their way of life. George and Lydia are also perplexed that the nursery is stuck on an African setting, with lions in the distance, eating the dead carcass of what they assume to be an animal.

There they also find recreations of their personal belongings, wondering why their children are so concerned with this scene of death. Therefore, they decide to call a psychologist. The psychiatrist evaluated that the children and he said to the parents that the children need treatment. Both of the children feel abandoned by their parents so they activated the room into a veldt where they imagine that they are looking for their missing parents because of the insufficient time their parents give them.

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In one point the psychiatrist says: “You’ve let this room and this house replaces you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. ” In this story man is destroyed by their machines in two ways: not only are George and Lydia were murdered by the nursery’s technology, but the children’s humanity is also destroyed. By identifying so closely with the nursery, the children have become less than human.

They feel no guilt, remorse or regret when their parents died, and it was clear that they have become as cold and emotionless as the machinery that controls the nursery. Children often feel powerless against adults and create elaborate sceneries in their heads in which they have the power to conquer any adult who refuses to give them what they want. George triggers these fantasies in Peter and Wendy when he threatens them to turn off the nursery. The children are used to getting their own way, and they become very angry when they cannot have what they want and the cycle of revenge starts in which they end up murdering their own parents.

When David McClean the psychiatrist asked the children where their parents are when they were on their way to New York it says in the story “The children looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, they’ll be here directly. ’” Even though they were the ones who killed their parents, they feel no emotions at all. In conclusion people would say that children are usually harmless and full of life but in the story “The veldt” because they felt abandoned by their parents and because of alienation Peter and Wendy gradually lost their innocence.

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