Hokla

"CESAR D AVILA ANDRÁDE" HIGH SCHOOL
(School year 2011- 2012)
ANALYSIS WORK FORCLASS F1VE
THE NIGHT OF THE WORLD
The writer
RAY BRADBURY (1920 - )
Ray Bradbury is a writer of science fiction - that kind of writing which invents worlds beyond the one we live in. But voyages into fantastic outer space are only one part of Bradbury's creation. He also travels into people's minds - into innerspace, as we call it - into their fears, anxieties, and hopes. Mr. Bradbury has been writing science fiction for more that forty years.
"The last night of the world" is form The illustrated Man, a collection of Bradbury's writings about outer space and inner s19, 1989, "because it's the year when things are as they are all over world ... Bombers on their schedules both
ways across the oceantonight... will never see land."
William Faulkner's speech was given in 1949. Ray Bradbury's story has a 1952 copyright. The date given for the
world's end is 1989, thirty-seven years beyond 1952. The first printing of Reflections was 1979, thirty years after
Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech and ten years before Bradbury's vision of the world's end.
The date of this writing is 1993. There are over onehundred armed conflicts going on all over the world. But no
one is talking about the end of the world or asking when a nuclear holocaust will take place. Instead, mere are
questions of another kind: How can we save the planet? How can we feed the hungry and look after the sick?
The troubles of a time - a decade, a generation, a century - will be reflected to turn in a country's literature.Perhaps it is time now for writers to turn away from nuclear disaster and to write about other problems, other
calamities, and new visions.
THE LAST NIGHT OF THE WORLD RAY BRADBURY
"What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?"
"What would I do? You mean seriously?"
Yes, seriously."
"I don't know. I hadn't thought."
He poured some coffee. In the background, the twogirls were playing blocks on the parlour rug in the
light of the green. Hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening
air.
"Well, better start thinking about it," he said.
"You don't mean it!"
He nodded. ...
"A war?"
He shook his head.
"Not the hydrogen or atom bomb? "
"No."
"Or germ warfare? "
None of those at all," he said, stirring his coffeeslowly. "But just, let's say the closing of a book."
"I don't think I really understand."
"No, nor do I, really; it's just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me; sometimes I'm not frightened at all but
at peace." He glanced in the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. "I didn't say anything to
you. It first happened four nights ago."
"What?"
"A dream I had. I dreamed that itwas all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I
can remember but a voice anyway, and it said it was going to stop here on Earth. I didn't think too much
about until the next day but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the
middle of the afternoon, and I said, "A penny for your thoughts, Stan," an he said, "I had a dream lastnight," and before he even told me I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I
listened to him."
"It was the same dream?"
"The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn't seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact Then we
started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn't planned. We didn't say "Let's walk around."
We just walked on an own, and everywhere we sawpeople looking at their desks, or their hands or out
windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan."
"And they all had dreamed?"
"All of them. The same dream with no difference."
"Do you believe in it?"
"Yes, I’ve never been more certain."
"And when will it stop? The world, I mean."
"Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that'll go too. It'll take...