Analysis of "the Last Night of the World"

ToloGbassage                

English 102, Composition and Literature        

Tracy Harris        

2017 March 08

The last night of the world by Ray Bradbury

The short story “the last night of the world” by Ray Bradbury was first published in 1951by the Esquire magazine. It is a story concerning a man and his wife who on this night, they discover that all the adults have been getting the same dream that that would be the last night of the world. As they discuss the details of the end of the world, they seem surprisingly calm. They wonder why the world would end particularly on this night, what they should be doing with the remaining time that they have and how they feel about this being their last night in the world. This paper is going to focus on the theme of calmness and acceptance and further elaborate on why the two characters in the story feel the way they do during what they know will be “the last day of the world”.

The story is set during the early years of the cold war after the Korean War. It is set in an environment where people are living in fear of threats like the germ warfare and the hydrogen atom bomb. Because of this, the characters in the story are surprised to learn that the end of the world would not be so violent and dramatic as everyone had expected. They get a sense that the end will be more like “the closing of a book” and that everything was just going to stop on earth.

After realizing that the world would eventually end on that night, the characters are swept off by a sense of calmness and acceptance as if accepting that fate could not be changed. The husband at some point confesses that he gets frightened by the end but says that sometimes he feels more “peaceful” (Bradbury 2) than afraid. His wife agrees with him that people “don’t get too excited when things are logical.” (Bradbury 3). Strangely enough, other people around them seem to be experiencing the same kind of calmness and acceptance. For example, the husband recalls telling his co-worker Stan about his dream and even after realizing that they had the same dream, Stan did not seem to react in shock, the husband says that, “he relaxed, in fact.” (Bradbury 2)

A close look at the sense of calmness and acceptance, one realizes that this acceptance and calm comes from the fact that the end of the world is inevitable and there is nothing that can be done to escape from it. The fact that everyone was experiencing the same dream meant that no one would be exempted and this brings about acceptance. The story briefly touches on some of the evils that are going on in the world at the time, "bombers on their course both ways across the ocean tonight that'll never see land again." (Bradbury 4)And the characters really wonder if they deserve to end in that manner. The husband seems to take consolation from the fact that they haven’t been “too bad” (Bradbury 3) but the wife tells him that they have neither been too bad nor too good. She says, “I suppose that's the trouble. We haven't been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things." (Bradbury 3)This comment can be construed to be a bit trenchant considering the story was written just a few years after the end of World War 2.