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Children of The Bedtime Machine, Character/Speaker, Literary Devices,…
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Character/Speaker
"The woman who lived in the house was hard. She had to be. It was a hoard world now."
The womans actions showed that she had lived through tough times.
"The woman felt her heart become slowly crushed...slowly, slowly...until she had trouble breathing."
The woman's emotion of sadness was taking over her. Her own thoughts were bringing back the painful memories.
"Oh!' the man suddenly said. His eyebrows went up. 'Yes, I do!"
The pure excitment of pulling out any sort of electronic that is usless or broken makes your life different than what it already is.
"She needed to see people."
The woman was alone in her thoughts. SHe was lonely as all of her close relatives have died in the unforgoten war, that sacrificed life over resources.
"After a time she released the hand crank and stepped back and though she was the biggest fool in this sad, broken world. Nothing happened."
This charactization describes the woman of giving up too fast.
"A year: 1988. A long time ago, forty years before her birth."
This phrase tells us a little bit about the woman's age, and when the story takes place.
"A little boy about ten years old, with brown hair and brown eyes and apple-plump cheeks. He was wearing a dark red sweater and white chino trousers with patches on the knees. He was wearing sneakers stained with playground dirt. His smile-broadened."
This is a introduction to the little boy from the story. He is the central motivation of the woman. The little buy helps her to not feel alone in the ruined and broken world. The boy appears to not be real, as he appears from the Betime Machine. This confuses the woman's thoughts as she starts thinking as maybe this is the actual reality.
"Then she cranked the bedtime machine some more."
She kept cranking the bedtime machine as this was the only thing keeping her going, gave a sense of well-being.
"Maybe the birds would come back someday, and maybe the trees would grow strong. Maybe they would build nests again, and maybe from them would come the sweet song of youth."
The woman's emotion turned into happiness as maybe someday all of this would happen. The bedtime machine really agve her hope into believing that the world would change. She does not understand this throught the story but to change these actions, a great scrifice must be given towards the world.
Literary Devices
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"Just a little bit, like the shell of a bitter egg."
Comparing the hard world to a hard shell of a bitter egg
"The woman rode her green bicycle, the color of May."
The color of green is used to symboliz the spring and warmth that May has to offer.
"Or a canopy of trees above her, with darkness laced through them like velvet."
Comparing the darkness laced through the canopy of trees above her to a velvet.
"This world that turns and turns through torments, trials, and tribulations, yet goes on like any person must...day by day."
This compares the world that does not stop spinning to someone moving on with their life.
Questions
"When any of the few birds still living passed by, always going somewherre else, the spindly trees seemed sad in their rejection, for no nests ever thrived amid the branches, and no sweet song of the youth was ever sung."
Why were there no kids? What happened? Is this story a post-apocaliptic?
"She grew some dwarf tomatoes" that were the color of the land and almost tastless, but at least they were tomatoes, and she was proud of them."
Is there no nutrients in the soil? It must be obiously hard to grow vegtebles as "she was proud of them."
"Before the stellites fell flaming from the sky. Before the buildings crashed down and the weather, summer in winter, and the oil burned in its millions of gallons upon the black-choked sea. Before so many of the fish and the birds and the animals God had commanded man to protect had died. So many."
Is this the end of the world?
"There was no panic, and there was very little violence."
Why is there no violence and panic since there is very little to eat. Shouldm't people be fighting over the food?
Later on in the text it is then described that "the ones who had lived by that ocde were long dead."
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Themes
"She could look out across a landscape the color of rust and see in the hazed distance the oil and natural gas pumps that no longer moved."
This text really shows how greatly of an impact was caused. It was the destruction of nature.
"The men who worked there wore guns, so nobody tried to steal anything a second time."
The violence and despair of the incomplete people. Only after are the effects of your actions felt truely.
The Children of the Bedtime Machine primarily focus' on the theme of struggle and pain caused by the same species. In the phrase "people had stopped eating so much. Everybody was thin," really brings out the theme as the people must must struggle greatly to find a source of nutrients to feed themselves.
"Maybe the birds would come back someday, and maybe the trees would grow strong. Maybe they would build nests again, and maybe from them would come the sweet song of youth." In this sentance the woman began to have a little hope for the Earth again. The small theme of hope throught the story gave the woman a sense of living.
Connections
"Fields burned under a grey sun."
This is a connection to a real world event to the forset fires that happened in British Coloumbia. The dark smoke then travelled towards Calgary that caused a grey sun.
"The men who worked there wore guns, so nobody tried to steal anything a second time."
This could relate to the Black Lives Matter protests going on with police. Officers are protectively guarding stores from looting and robbery.
Vocabulary
"And so too were the woman and her children, both of the present and those yet to be born, in the town she reached with her backpack of books and her green bicycle the color of May."
The elevated word of 'green' is brought in to bring hope of happiness, as the bedtime machine brought in a small spark of hope that the world will once be like it was before. Green represents nature and the natural world, the green beauty of the planet. The color that was once present.
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