In Ray Bradbury's short story, The Veldt, he invites us to imagine a future in which there is a device capable of recreating any scene directly by the user fantasy in an absolutely believable way. This technology is used to entertain children, in devices called nurseries. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Like many things in literature, I believe this should not be taken literally at face value, and instead Bradbury's intent here is to satirize our relationship with the technology we create. The nursery, which can make anything you can imagine real, is designed to represent our growing ability to use technology for our own ends. I think the following quote1 gives a good impression of what I mean. "Don't let them do it!" Peter groaned at the ceiling, as if he were speaking to the house, to the nursery. "Don't let dad kill everything." He turned to his father. "Oh, I hate you!" "Insults don't get you anywhere." "I wish you were dead!" "We have been, for a long time. Now we will start to truly live. Instead of being manipulated and massaged, we will live." Wendy was still crying and Peter reached out to her again. “Just a moment, just a moment, just one more moment of nursery,” they wailed. "Oh, George," said the wife, "it can't hurt." "Okay... okay, if they keep quiet. One minute, mind you, and then gone forever." "Daddy, daddy, daddy!" the children sang, smiling with wet faces. "And then we're going on holiday. David McClean will be back in half an hour to help us move and get to the airport. I'm going to get dressed. Turn on the bedroom for a minute, Lydia, a moment, mind you." Peter says "I wish you were dead" and his father thinks little of it, the not atypical outburst of a stubborn, indignant child. Unfortunately for Peter his house is equipped with a device designed to extract and amplify these thoughts directly from Peter's head and make them real. In "ordinary" life the father would be protected from the son's deadly impulses through a difference in strength. The child is most likely incapable of killing his father. But with the advent of technology, "daycare" has inadvertently given the child this power. This is a very important quote in this working because I believe it reveals the message that Bradbury is trying to impart. The child in this story is not to be interpreted literally, but as a metaphor for ourselves and our foolish destructive tendencies. He fears that we might develop powerful technology without understanding or respecting the danger this power might pose to ourselves. There is an additional layer here, which is that our supposedly better natures, adults in this metaphor, are unable to resist the temptation to please children. They give up, “just for a minute,” the father says, but it's a minute too late. The foolish children put their plan into action, metaphorically our worst nature got the better of us. Interestingly, this story was published in 1950, when the Cold War was beginning to take hold between the United States and Russia, and the nuclear issue was on everyone's mind. Perhaps, and I think it is likely, the metaphor here can apply to Bradbury's thoughts on the situation we were in at the time. Where our technology had advanced to the point where world powers could annihilate each other a thousand times over, but our basic human nature remained relatively primitive and quick to take impulsive actions, or to borrow Bradbury's metaphor: infantile. I think.