Ray Bradbury’s “There will come soft rains” and HBO’s Chernobyl: A Post-apocalyptic Reading with special reference to the predicament of Domesticated Dogs

Abstract

This paper intends to study Ray Bradbury’s much anthologised story “There will come soft rains” and HBO’s popular miniseries Chernobyl from an eco-apocalyptic perspective, drawing attention to how the texts engage with the tangled fate of the domesticated dogs, as well as, human beings in the post-apocalyptic world. The fate of all life on the planet depends a lot on what the humans do over the next 50 years. Eco-apocalypse, an off shoot of Ecocritical studies, is concerned with the disastrous consequences of mindless human activities that is likely to bring both the human and the non-human world to the brink of devastation. By destroying the ecosystem human beings are not only causing bifurcation from and detriment to the non-human world, but also inviting their own destruction. Dogs, strays or pets, have been domesticated since millennia and this relationship has given birth to an entire subspecies that has no apparent ability to fend for themselves and depend entirely on their human companions. A dog’s future is thus in jeopardy in a post-apocalyptic world if the humans turn away their face from them. In fact, unlike other animals that might survive to see the renewal and rebirth of the ecosystem, a dog’s existence is trapped between epochs of domestication and the estimated eventual absence of humans. The domesticated dog in Bradbury’s story comes back to an empty house unable to live by itself and dies inside a locked house and this disastrous event in Bradbury’s story draws parallels with how most domesticated dogs of the residents of Pripyat were shot dead by authorities as a radiation prevention measure after the Chernobyl disaster, as showcased in HBO’s Series of the same name.