26 pages • 52 minutes read
Ray BradburyZero Hour
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Loss of Innocence
Innocence (and the loss thereof) is an important theme in Ray Bradbury’s work, including many of the stories set in Green Town, a fictionalized version of the small town in Illinois where he spent his early childhood. Bradbury’s exploration of innocence often centers around how a seemingly idyllic childhood can have a sinister underbelly, or how the innocence of childhood can be forced into a clash with the harsh realities of the adult world (sometimes represented by an extraterrestrial or supernatural threat).
“Zero Hour” invokes the loss of innocence in several ways. The fact that the story’s plot hinges on a game that the children are playing is essential: What could be more innocent than children at play? Mink and her friends are immersed in the fun of it all:
Oh, it was to be so jolly! What a game! Such excitement they hadn’t known in years. The children catapulted this way and that across the green lawns, shouting at each other, holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing […]. Overhead, the rockets flew and beetle-cars whispered by on the streets, but the children played on. Such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling and hearty screaming (Paragraph 1).
The children are absorbed in their game, and the adults find it charming, if not worthy of particular notice. Over the course of the story, however, it becomes clearer to the reader that the “game” of Invasion is in fact deadly serious, tarnishing the innocence of the children’s play.
In addition to the way the nature of play loses its innocence throughout the narrative, the children themselves also become less innocent, as can be seen through the character arc of Mink. She enters the story as a rambunctious child and exits it as something akin to the Boogeyman when she unleashes an alien upon her terrified parents. Mink’s loss of innocence is gradual throughout the story. In the beginning, she’s hyper-focused on how fun and exciting the “game” is; in the middle, she’s blithely talking about the extermination of adults and older children; and in the end, she’s willingly initiating that extermination.
However, even as Mink speaks of and commits heinous acts, it remains unclear how aware she is of the consequences of her actions. During the lunch scene, when she explains to an amused Mrs. Morris what the world will look like under alien rule, she parrots Drill’s words without knowing what they mean or how to pronounce them: “dim-dims” for “dimensions” and “lodge…ick” for logic. Therefore, it’s difficult to pinpoint how much of what she’s saying she actually understands.
Are Mink and the other children guilty of leading humanity to its doom, or only of being hoodwinked by cannier beings? “Zero Hour” doesn’t offer a definite answer, but either way, by the end of the story the carefree innocence the children had at the beginning is gone.
Generational Alienation
The concept of alienation is an essential theme in Modernist literature. Modernist writers struggled to make sense of a dramatically changed world in the wake of World War I. The familiar, in many ways, was no longer familiar. Writers captured this in many different forms: a character might become alienated from their family, their sense of self, or their societal role. In “Zero Hour,” Bradbury focuses on a sense of alienation between generations: the sense that children are alien to their parents and vice versa.
Generational alienation in “Zero Hour” is illustrated by a clear failure of communication between children and adults. The aliens’ plan to invade Earth is hardly a closely guarded secret, as Mink is all too willing to share the details of it with her mother without even being prompted. The problem is that Mrs. Morris is unwilling or unable to take any of what Mink is saying seriously—a failure that is shared by the other parents of children involved in the Invasion. When Mrs. Morris converses with her friend Helen, both women dismiss the odd coincidence of their children’s shared “game” by laughing about the antics of kids: “‘Are your kids playing that game too?’ ‘Lord, yes. Tomorrow it’ll be geometrical jacks and motorized hopscotch. Were we this bad when we were kids in ’48?’” (Paragraphs 118-19). The adults’ refusal to take children’s perspectives seriously—and their resulting belittling attitude—widens the gap between the generations.
The theme of generational alienation is also emphasized by the way that familial power dynamics are disrupted and inverted as the plot proceeds. The adults spend most of the story firmly convinced that they’re in charge of their children. This assumption is complicated as the climax of the story approaches: When Mrs. Morris performs her final check-in on Mink and tries to ascertain what upset Peggy Ann, Mink is unhelpful, distracted, and intractable. Her refusal to concede to her mother’s will irritates Mrs. Morris, who retreats. The next time that Mink and her parents are in a scene together, the balance of power has completely reversed, and the adults are entirely at the mercy of the children and the aliens. In fact, by the final scene, the children have become so alienated from their parents that they are much more closely aligned with the literal aliens. This is illustrated in the last lines of the story when Mink appears in the attic doorway with Drill’s shadow spilling out behind her.
The Role of Technology in Reshaping Society
Bradbury, like many prominent science fiction writers during the 20th century, used his writing to explore concerns about how modern technology would affect and reshape society. The presence of futuristic technology in “Zero Hour” is subtle but important. Readers are situated in the unspecified future timeline in the very first paragraph, with mentions of “rockets” and “beetle-cars” as part of the neighborhood tableau.
The role of futuristic technology within the plot itself is split along two distinct lines: the use of technology by the adults, and the use of technology by the children. The children’s use of technology is haphazard and almost furtive. They abscond with common household items in order to construct mysterious structures: “The ring of children drew in around Mink where she scowled at her work with spoons and a kind of square shaped arrangement of hammers and pipes. ‘There and there,’ murmured Mink” (Paragraph 151). The adults fail to understand these constructions as anything remotely technological: “Looks like a scrap drive,” says Helen to Mrs. Morris (Paragraph 127). When explosions ring out across the country at the end of the story, it becomes clear that whatever the children have built has played an essential role in allowing the aliens to arrive. In this way, technology widens the generational divide, as it alters adults’ understanding of and relationship with children, permanently impacting the future social structure of society.
Meanwhile, the adults in “Zero Hour” use technology that is more obviously futuristic, but they use it in a far more everyday manner. The two most prominent examples are Mrs. Morris’s massage chair and the “audio-visor” she uses to speak to Helen. These devices serve to further the adults’ disconnect from reality and from the children. When Mrs. Morris and Helen converse over the audio-visor, they compare notes on their children’s behavior, only to dismiss all of the troubling signs and move on to more ordinary concerns:
On the audio-visor, Helen laughed. ‘Tim brought one of those yo-yo’s in this morning, but when I got curious he said he wouldn’t show it to me, and when I tried to work it, finally, it wouldn’t work.’
‘You’re not impressionable,’ said Mrs. Morris.
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Something I thought of. Can I help you, Helen?’
‘I wanted to get that black and white cake recipe—’ (Paragraphs 138-42).
The scene with Mrs. Morris’s massage chair unfolds along similar lines. Frustrated with Mink’s reticence, Mrs. Morris relaxes in her chair and has a drink. She begins to think about children, notably about children’s complex relationship to “love and hate” (Paragraph 157), but does not allow the thought to carry her anywhere meaningful, instead relaxing further. Here, technology serves as a distraction from the issues at hand.
The subtle but insidious role played by technology in “Zero Hour” foreshadows the concerns held by many writers in the mid-20th century: that technology in the future might reshape society in potentially negative, and even dystopian, ways.
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