There Will Come Soft Rains Character Analysis

In 2026 when humans are extinct due to what seems to be a nuclear bomb, there is a singular house standing. This post apocalyptic scene of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is perfectly conveyed through this house who the main character of the story. While not being a very common subject, Bradburry brings life and emotions into a futuristic and automated house through the use of personification.

The house is empty of its occupants, referred to as “gods” (Bradbury, 1950, line 55), yet it continues to perform its household routines such as cleaning and preparing food.

These routines continue due to the fact that the house is automated, but due to Bradbury’s use of personification, the reader the reader turns these automated responses into feelings, for example, when a dog leaves behind mud and dirt in the house; the house is sends cleaning mice who are “angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience” (Bradbury, 1950, line 61).

The house’s movements come off as paranoid, confused, and irrational.

When the house senses movements, it asks “‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection…” (Bradbury, 1950, line 46).

While the house is personified, it is not capable to showing and feeling real human emotions. This makes the house a very interesting character; sometimes the house seems to show emotion, dragging the reader to feel and understand what the house is feeling, yet other times the house is completely lacking emotions in a time that counts.

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When the dog comes in the house to die, the house lacks all sympathy for the dog and continues to clean up and disregard of its dying body.

As the story is coming to an end, the house goes up in flames, “The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air” (Bradbury, 1950, line 164), and this is the part of the story where the use of personification is so apparent that the reader finds themselves feeling emotions for a house.

Ray Bradbury chose an unlikely subject as the main character of his story and through the use of personification he turned an empty house into a rounded character with emotions.