THE VELDT

By Ray Bradbury
Humor is an aesthetic category that points out to the quality that makes a situation
funny. Funny situations comprise those activities, happenings, facts that provoke
laughing. Literature often uses humor as a way of teaching people or as mockery towards
different negative human characteristics. I believe that even if there was an original
comic intention of the author, in Ray Bradburys The Veldt the horror of the story
overcomes every other aesthetic category. The Veldt is a horrifying story that, in my
opinion cannot be considered at least bit humorous.
The story presents the life of the Hadleys, a typical American family, whose
world is ruled by machinery all over the place. They do not even have a life of their own;
machines do everything for them. They are in possession of voice clocks, stoves,
heaters, shoe shiners, shoe lacers, body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every
other machine he could put his hand to. The Hadleys have all this equipment and yet
their world is empty. There is nothing funny about the emptiness of their lives. This
specific aspect of their lives makes their existence impossible. They are useless in a world
where everything serves them. They just live for the sake of living; they do not even have
a purpose. Their lives are based on this machinery and the awareness that they are useless
is painful for them: I feel like I dont belong here.
The story of The Veldt is constructed on several key-elements, sentences that
foresee the tragical ending. Did you see? Did you feel? Its too real.-Cries out Lydia
after the episode when the parents live the horrifying tension of the African veldt. The
mother somehow previews that something wrong is going to happen. So does the
psychologist, who knows that the Hadley children live in a world created by their own
imagination, and yet, he still feels somehow awkward when he is surrounded by those
lions: Now Im feeling persecuted. The image of the lions that might become elements
of the real world is first of all perceived by Lydia, after which George returns to this
question too: ...they could become real? paranoia and hysterics become major
characteristics of the Hadleys. From the moment in which George and David McClean,
the psychologist, leave the room, everything seems to go mad. Events happen in a rapid
succession, as if life did not have time for our characters any more. Death seems to hover
all over the house, an intense feeling of terrifying future seems to lead us, readers, to a
final conclusion. The creation of this tension is promoted also by the semantic field of
death, words that nevertheless foresee a bad ending: The house was full of dead bodies,
it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. The sombre image of the house and
immediately the wishful thinking of the child: I wish you were dead. Reveals a
psychological tension exiting between our characters. We are now aware of the fact that
they are not comfortable neither with one another, nor with their own selves.
The ending of the story, the death of the parents caused by their own children
creates stupefaction. Children seem to be possessed by a force that they cannot or that
they do not want to control. Nobody can stand in their way, in creating their own world,
as the further statement reveals it: Dont let Father kill everything. That everything
for the children is their imaginary world, not their parents. Their parents built up the
world they live in, and yet they prefer the final product- the veldt- instead of the ones
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who wanted the best for them. The shocking ending where nobody seems to be bothered
by the disappearance of the adults somehow explains the whole psychological
background of the story.
Superficially thinking, I believe that this story can be interpreted as having some
elements of humor, but we cannot say that it can be considered humorous. All in all, I
believe that no humor lies under these tragic events. Facts are presented here without any
funny episode and we, readers are supposed to decipher the meaning of this horror.