There Will Come Soft Rains

“The success of any story depends on the way it is told”

Storytellers use short stories to portray people, places and ideas in order to entertain and engage the audience’s interest. The success of any story depends upon the way is it told as to achieve its purpose the author intended. Composers of texts use a variety of narrative techniques to convey the themes, characters, setting and plot of the story to the responder and thus fulfill its purpose. I will be illustrating this through the analysis of the Henry Lawson stories including “The Drover’s Wife” and “The Loaded Dog” and through other related texts “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury and “Charles” by Shirley Jackson. These stories present a variety of techniques in order
Bradbury uses a variety of techniques to achieve the purpose of engaging and entertaining the reader. The orientation of the story, much like “The Drover’s Wife” is successful in engaging the reader’s interest from the beginning. The unusual situation revealed to the responder in the opening paragraphs of the story, involving the automated house standing alone, surviving a nuclear blast and the mystery of its inhabitants arouses a sense curiosity and intrigue. Bradbury uses narration in “lived happily while the world trembled” and cumulation in the line “one day the world shook and there was an explosion, following by ten thousand explosions and red fire in the sky and a rain of ashes and radioactivity, and the happy time was over” to arouse a sense of mystery and intrigue in the setting of the story and successfully captivates the reader to question this unusual situation and read
It involves a humorous story about a boy named Laurie starting kindergarten and getting into trouble at school, then deceiving his parents by telling them of a bad boy called Charles getting up to mischief, which is really himself. Jackson uses the language style of first person, from the mother’s point of view to develop the story from a one sided, biast perspective. In the opening paragraph, the mother narrates the image of Laurie as a “sweet-voiced nursery-school tot” and the audience is lead to believe her. As the story continues, oblivious to real nature of Laurie the reader is engaged by the mischief and bad boy behavior that is expressed by Laurie to his parents of this mysterious boy named Charles. Similar to the “Loaded Dog” in that Humor is used to attract and entertain the reader. Jackson uses the dialogue of Laurie to reveal the character of Charles to the reader which creates humor and intrigues the audience. The dialogue of Laurie’s telling his parents of Charles “Today Charles hit the teacher” and “Charles was bad again today” and also the dialogue of the parents “this Charles boy sounds like a bad influence” is used for a humorous effect and attracts the