Commentary on The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

One of my all-time favorite authors is Ray Bradbury.  I love just about everything he’s written and I admire how his writing seems to jump off the pages and almost become a movie in my mind.  I’ve tried to mimic that style.

In The Veldt a family has just purchased a house with the latest technology and machines that do everything. Even from just the early description, Bradbury’s opinion on this can be seen. Too much reliance on technology is not a blessing.

The nursery in the book is able to connect with the children telepathically and can create any place they imagine. The children soon do nothing but live in the worlds created by the nursery. Here I see Bradbury pointing to the dangers of losing touch with reality. Fantasy can and should be pretty and it is a nice escape but it can never replace the real world. When it does, trouble looms on the horizon.

The parents eventually change their minds and decided to eliminate their reliance on technology.  The children beg their parents to let them have one last visit to the nursery and the parents relent. Any parent can empathize with children wanting just a little more of something they’ve been allowed to have for a long time. Bradbury implies that the parents should have refused. I disagree. The request is not unreasonable as written.

When the parents come to the nursery to retrieve the children, the kids lock them in from the outside. This is where it starts to unravel logically for me.  How did the parents not see the children outside the nursery?  What type of nursery has a lock on it?

SPOILER ALERT: No matter how much you stretch the limits of science fiction and, more importantly, the parameters set up within the story, the death of the parents is implausible. There is no way that the house or the nursery could have created real lions that would have actually eaten the parents. There are precise laws on the subjects of physics, matter and spontaneous generation. Nowhere in the story is this addressed to make the ending credible. Despite this logic flaw, The Veldt is an incredible story with vivid descriptions and an important message.