All summer in one day

All summer in one day

This story is written by Ray Bradbury who is known for his works in science-fiction and speculative fantasy. He usually chooses futuristic settlement as a scene for depicting different social problems and sins of the society. This story is not an exception.

Here we see difficulties of life on the Venus and peculiarities of human behavior arising from the circumstances. As the action takes place on another planet, the environment is too unusual or better to say unsuitable for a human being: seven years of severe unstoppable pouring just for 2 hours are broken by the sun. And such settlement provokes the conflict.

Among the children born on the Venus and as a result not having seen the sun from the age of 2 there is one girl who has come from the sunny Earth when she was 7. Margot is a rara avis and not only she but all the children understand it. From the very beginning she is envied and even hated by her mates, who are eager to see such a miracle as the sun and when the time for this phenomenon comes, the children lock her in the closet seized by the furious envy and desire to revenge. The conflict between Margot and other kids is the most obvious in the story.

One more severe conflict takes place between Margot and the reality of Venus. The planet, its climate itself confronts the girl. For Margo who has lived 4 years on the sunny Earth the life on Venus is unbearable. A huge pressure put on the girl can be seen in the sentence: “thousand upon thousand of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands”. The amount of water falling down from the sky is expressed through a repetition of “thousand and thousand”, it’s not just a rain, but it seems just like the entire empyrean opened up. Metaphoric gradation “the drum and gush of water, concussion of storms” alongside with the figure of quasi-identity “tidal waves” put in depression even the reader who is spared from all this noise unlike poor Margot. This reality is too much different and constantly drives her crazy. For 5 years she has been living for just one moment – to see the sun which is to come for 2 hours, but her dream won’t ever be fulfilled. She is too much an alien on the Venus and is doomed to suffer being mentally, emotionally and physically separated from the inhabitants who are represented by the image of all kids.

The children are presented as a certain unity, crowd from the very beginning to underline the massiveness, despair and futility of attempts to resist this crowd. This is proved by the simile “The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun “, although roses are expected to awake more pleasant associations. There is no appearance, characters, names of the kids. They move, behave, think and hate Margo as a massive unity and when the conflict reaches its peak they “surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door”. This is also a gradation depicting the force of a crowd over a tiny helpless Margo leaving her no chance to resist.

Unlike massive and powerful in comparison to her crowd Margo is a lonely frail girl. The author prefers describing her directly to underline her difference from the other children even by her appearance. “She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. ” A simile to an old photograph is the most picturesque and more than anything shows how hard it is for Margo to bear this planet. She is like a flower which tends to wither without the sun. The sentence “Dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away” emphasizes directly with the help of repetition how outstanding in negative sense she is.  All the time she is in a gaze dreaming to see the sun again, she is giving it different comparisons: “It's like a penny”, “It's like a fire in the stove." Margo even wrote a small poem about it. The theme of the sun is the only one interesting to her, but every time she says something about it she is being mocked at.

Due to Margo’s Earth origin, peculiarities of the behavior and reluctance to communicate with venutians she unwillingly provokes the conflict. She is also eager to see the sun, but the children consider it being unjustified and burst into fury locking her in the closet. Such cruelty is strange for children, but still the author marks the coldness of  their action putting in one sentence a row of verbs marking her passiveness in this situation. In general this sentence “surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door” is a big climax as in its structure  as well as in the story itself. And only begins the rain again, cools it down the children’s emotions and the silently let her out all shamed and realizing how painful it has been to Margo to spend such moments in a hollow dark closet.

The story ends up at this moment leaving the reader think up what could have happened to Margo next, whether she would survive next 7 years of rain or would be sent back to Earth or silently pass away like a flower without sunlight.

In conclusion I can say that sometimes circumstances are too pressing for a person to cope with them and one has to suffer without opportunity get used to the new way of things. 
 

Jane Chekalina, I - 52