METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF TIME, HISTORY, AND HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY IN RAY BRADBURY’S “A SOUND OF THUNDER”
Keywords:
Ray Bradbury; conceptual metaphor; time travel; causality; ecocriticism; science fiction; chaos theoryAbstract
This article investigates the intricate system of metaphors in Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction short story “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), demonstrating how metaphorical imagery shapes the narrative’s philosophical reflection on time, history, causality, and human responsibility. While existing scholarship has primarily treated the story as a foundational text in chaos theory’s popularization-specifically the “butterfly effect”-this analysis argues that Bradbury constructs a far more sophisticated metaphorical network through which time becomes a living structure, history functions as a fragile organism, and individual actions acquire catastrophic global significance. Integrating Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson), narratology, ecocriticism, and science fiction studies, the analysis examines eight interconnected metaphors: the butterfly as historical interconnectedness, the Time Path as a boundary of human intervention, the prehistoric jungle as primordial history, the Tyrannosaurus Rex as inevitable historical forces, time travel as the desire to control the past, altered language as historical transformation, the hunting expedition as human dominance over nature, and the sound of thunder as irreversible consequences. Bradbury’s metaphorical system transforms a genre narrative into a profound meditation on the vulnerability of civilization and the ethical weight of human choices, with implications for contemporary ecological and political thought.
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