Senior II

The Illustrated Man

Choose TWO of these activities and analyse the character.

All Summer in a Day - Ray Bradbury

Read the story by Ray Bradbury and write a SUMMARY.

Summary

In the story “All Summer in a Day”, a girl called Margot, is discriminated because of some of the differences she had with her companions. She lives in Venus with her family in a possible future, although the story doesn’t specify it, we can imagine it. This place is a rainy place. The author emphasizes a lot in the atmosphere: “It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain”. The atmosphere created in the story is a sad one.

The story begins with Margot bullied and discriminated. The conflict is that the kids locked Margot inside a closet when the sun was coming up for the first time after seven years of rain. The climax is when Margot friends go outside to play with the sun while Margot is still locked. Finally, the resolution is unexpected because the only thing that happens is that the children unlocked Margot. We all expected a more developed ending but it is a good one because it leaves the readers with a lot of questions, questions that their imagination must answer for them.

The main idea or topic in which the story focus is in discrimination, bullying and jealously amongst kids. What the author wanted to explain through this story, in my opinion, is that not just adults have problems and that for kids, problems or conflicts are more difficult to solve. In this story, there are not so many characters. The main character or protagonist is Margot, the girl mentioned before, who had problems with her friends. Though for most of the readers, the antagonist is William, the boy who bullied her the most, for me, the teacher is more important. The teacher is the one who started all the conflict by leaving the classroom and leaving the kids alone. I recommend this story very much because it teaches you what videogames and movies cannot teach, friendship.