Family Matters: Literary Analysis of the Veldt and Heart of a Dog Essay

Family Matters Literary Analysis of The veld and Heart of a Dog A family unit is like a fragile, expensive artifact. It female genital organ be absolutely beautiful, but it can as well as absolutely shatter into a million pieces if the wrong entity gets ahold of it. Some eras, this critical entity that shatters it may be engineering science that has been employ in the wrong ways. In both The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury, and Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov, the tycoonfulness of applied science threatens to bring down the family unit as the reader commonly knows it.The technology in each(prenominal) book first grows the idea of family, but ultimately ends up hurting the neighborly combat-ready of the family it had hoped to expand. These books look the problems that technology causes that were originally trying to fix them. In this way, technology helped to support these families initially, but last knocked them down, shattering them hopelessly into the ground. In Ray Bradbur ys The Veldt, the Hadley family wanted technology to make their lives easier, more care renounce, and as a life enhancer. They made their house do everything possible to mechanize ordinary household chores.The Happylife Home dress and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them (12) this indicated the attempt to create an environment that would be free of worries. The nursery, the dreamlike play point George Hadley had installed because nothing is too good for our children (14) was so amazing that George was filled with amazement for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room (15) In this sense, George was doing what he could for his family, trying to bring them closer by providing the mode to a happier existence for his kids, as well as his wife.With every chore taken care of, what worries could maven possibly have? As the family would eventually find out, there were quite a few problems. in truth quickly did this dreamlike world filled with ea siness and carefree living come crashing down on the Hadleys. With her regular duties such as cooking and cleaning taken up by the omnipresent house, Lydia Hadley was deprive of her usual sanity she finds in her chores. She vents about her replacement as a caretaker in the family when she states, I detect like I dont belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid.Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. (16) era the house was designed to make Lydias home life much less stressful, she laments the fact that her place in the family has been overtaken by an inanimate object, and that she has lost all hope of connecting with her family. She is also not the only soul whose role has changed via the houses do everything programming. Lydia comments on her husbands nature by reflection You look as if you didnt know what to do with yourself in this house, either.You smo ke a little moredrink a little moreneed a sedative every night. Youre outset to feel unnecessary too. (17) These mechanical tools that were intended to increase family bonding time by taking outdoor(a) chores have or else induced a sense of laziness. This was a critical step for the Hadleys, replacing everyday work not with enriching playtime, but with sheer boredom, showing how this technology has worsened their conditions. The technology essentially replaced George and Lydia as parents and caretakers, setting the stage for a social upheaval in the family.When the nursery was left to its own devices, the kids, prick and Wendy, grew in power, lookmingly overthrowing George and Lydia, ceasing to listen to them anymore. A chilling example of this is when George threatens to turn off the house and shaft of light coldly states, I dont think youd better consider it any more, Father. To which George replies I wont have any threats from my give-and-take (23) This shows how the p ower balance has shifted from the adults to the kids. Peter turns into a cold, mean-spirited son when George keeps threatening to turn off the house, boldly proclaiming Oh, how I hate youI wish you were dead (26) This is just now foreshadowing a few pages later when the kids lock George and Lydia into the nursery with the lions, to be brutally murdered. Over the physical body of just a short time, the reader witnesses how the technology of the house had overturned a seemingly bright family into a socially backward, messed up family. In Mikhail Bulgakovs Heart of a Dog, Philip Philippovich uses his surgical practices in swan to create a family unit, which ultimately runs astray. Philippovich uses his technology on the dog Sharikov in order to transform he dog to a human and assert his dominance over this human that he creates. It is an incredible job in technology that starts with a positive thought about creation, yet ends in pure misadventure and despair.While Preobrazhensky may not have the stereotypical family situation, it can be argued that by asserting his experimental condition as master of Sharikov, Preobrazhensky was claiming his status as a father figure for Sharikov. One such time where Sharikov calls Philipovich his dad is during a meal in which Philipovich is being very impatient with Sharikov, and Sharikov retorts, saying Youre acquiring too hard on my, dad. (70) While Philipovich gets very defensive about this statement, and doesnt want to be called a dad, the fact that Sharikov even considers this a possibility is a huge telltale sign into their social structure of the home. It is also essentially the beginning of the end for their life as a family unit. While the technology of the surgery may have led to a creation of a family dynamic between Sharikov and Preobrazhensky, however, eventually this same dynamic eventually crashes, and the same technology used to create a human being to a dog, transforms that same human back into a dog.Th is represents the dismantling of a family unit by the pass on of the same technology that set it up in the first place. Philippovich has an epiphany near the end of the novel, realizing he does not need to be a creator, a father figure, when nature itself will take care of the creating. Preobrazhensky grumbles, The surgery skill be possible to turn a dog into a highly advanced human. But what the nether region for? Doctor, the human race takes care of this by itself, and every year, in the course of its evolution, it creates dozens of outstanding geniuses who invest the earth, stubbornly selecting them out of the mass of scum (103).This is when he decides that the technology he has been using to create his family dynamic is essentially useless, and that the technology of the surgery only caused him more harm than good. In comparing these two books readers can see how the use of different forms of technology worked on each family unit in similar ways, in the lead to a destructi on of family. In The Veldt, the Hadley family comes as an already established, traditional family structure, however, upon the introduction to technology seemingly fall apart at the seams. This is contrasted to theHeart of a Dog, where the definition of family is slightly different. In this book, the reader can see how technology singlehandedly create and then pull apart a family structure, effectively showing the immense power that this technology has. In each book, however, we can see the huge difference that this technology makes on the family. The Veldt has a murderous ending which can be solely attributed to the new technological advances of the nursery. The Heart of a Dog displays a harsh yet familial father-son relationship that breaks down with the misuse of the powerful technology that created it.Through these two novels the reader discovers how technology, when misused, can cause the serious destruction of family. Both Bradbury and Bulgakov challenge the sentiment that t echnology is always progressive in nature, and instead offer an alternative, showing how technology can instead break and crumble an important social institution. Both stories can be looked at as at one point incredible artifacts which, via the mistaken power of technology, collapsed onto themselves and shattered into mess.