The Pedestrian

Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" is a simple short story with a deeper meaning. It is the short tale of Mr. Leonard Mead whom, in the year 2053 A.D., walks miles and miles each day or preferrably night throughout the city. Though roughly three million people inhabit this large city, absolutely nobody walks, thus he walks alone and has been for the past ten years. The narrator explains that the streets in the day are filled with "a thunderous surge of cars" and all kinds of bustling and comotion, but never just people simply walking (even if they are reaching a destination by means of walking, nobody does it). Inevitably, the man is finally stopped by somebody. Only that somebody is really not a being at all, its a police car programmed to respond to "crime" or just questionable people as a human officer would. After being questioned by the "officer", it is finally decided that poor Mr. Mead should be locked up and taken to a hospital for numerous reasons. One being that he doesn't have a wife, like everybody else, to take up for him. Another reason being that he claims he doesnt watch television or use his air conditioner when he feels he needs a breath of fresh air. And lastly, of course, he is simply walking for the hell of it which is something in this society that the average person simply doesn't do.

Mr. Leonard Mead seems to be a fairly simple person, and it seems to be evident that if he lived in this present time period he would be completely average. He is not an indoor person obviously, and multiple times throughout the story the narrator focuses in on Mr. Mead taking in all the beauty of nature (or whatever is left of it). Simple things like leaves crunching underneath him, or even picking up a leaf or two just to examine it. No doubt Mr. Mead is quite the average human being, which is what makes this story all the more interesting as to why he ends up being taken to a psychiatric hospital.

Ray Bradbury has a pretty interesting style of writing in my opinion. I've noticed that there is typically alot of foreshadowing in Bradbury's pieces, which can sometimes get confusing. For instance, one might begin to read this piece and automatically assume that Mr. Mead is all alone (perhaps like in his other work "There Will Come Soft Rains"). That is until you notice the hints that he drops every so often. The first one that I noticed was when he said "he was alone in this world of 2053 A.D., or as good as alone..". This doesn't impact the reader quite as much because we hadn't yet truly gotten the sense that Mr. Mead was definitely alone, but it follows soon after, which immediately raises many questions for the reader.

I think that Bradbury is obviously voicing his personal opinion about what society might come to in later days as a result of being so engulfed in technology and not so much on other people, or nature, or even yourself. Examples of this could be the fact that one of the reasons Mr. Mead was arrested was because he didnt have a wife, or that he doesnt crank up the AC to get a breath or fresh air, instead he walks. This is where the cop car serves Bradbury's purpose of really portraying where society stood at in that point in time. The cop finds it ridiculous that Bradbury doesnt watch television, and walks at night. All of this things contribute to Bradburys bigger picture, which appears to be quite similar in most of his other pieces.

This piece is, like I said before, simple but the bigger scheme of things isnt so simple at all. It gets somewhat difficult to grasp what is really going on in the story as opposed to Bradbury falsly leading you in some parts. Bradbury doesnt do this for the sole purpose of it, he commands the readers full attention by doing this because it does take some thinking to understand the Bradburys message. I would definitely reccommend this story to anybody interested in any of Bradbury's other pieces, because to me it was similar to his overall futuristic messages in both "Farenheit 451" and "There Will Come Soft Rains". Very interesting story.