Leonard Mead, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” rebels against his futuristic society’s overreliance on TV (oh, if Ray Bradbury only knew that phones would be worse).  Mead scorns the automatons who stay inside and watch TV.  But he is also an outcast by his revolutionary act of walking down the street. 

Is this sci-fi or present day reality?  Ironically, people can’t really be found walking except in the inner city, where there is more of a sense of a physical community (people on their stoops, greeting each other in the street). So the suburbs of today don’t look to different than the dystopian city which Bradbury imagines, whereas in the inner city people are at least ambulating outside, though possibly up to no good. 

There is the issue of technology’s overbearing influence on society, certainly a theme of “The Pedestrian,” but also the idea that a man alone, a man walking rather than driving, is somehow a rebuke to the society of 2053 in Bradbury’s sci-fi short story.  The “dogs in intermittent squads” who bark and threaten the protagonist, along with the “startled” faces which appear in the window demonstrate a world which has turned against this ancient form of transportation. 

However, it is all worth it, despite the hostility of the outside world.  Walking affords a qualitatively different sensory experience which is quite impossible when one buzzes by in a car. How else to experience “the branches filled with invisible snow,” or the “faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves.”  

Mead gently mocks the denizens inside with their TV’s: 

“Hello, in there, What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?”  

More than anything, it reflects the tame programming of Bradbury’s society, shows about cowboys and Indians, the assumption that we’re the good guys. If that were an example of the degradation of our culture, what would Bradbury say now? This is not to strike a puritanical tone, yet suffice it to say that whatever malady Bradbury felt his society suffered with regards to TV, it is much worse now. 

Cars, the transportation system of America, are considered something almost satanic: 

“During the day it was a thunderous surge of cars, the petrol stations open, a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far directions.” 

Our complete reliance on cars is something apart from nature, a blight on our serenity, yet so taken for granted, just as watching TV, a mindless activity of a degraded civilization. 

The cop which stops to interrogate Mead is unmanned, yet serves to function as a kind of superego for a sick society. Mead might be perfectly blameless, but what does that matter when one is out of step with other people? And so he is on the wrong side of the law, almost just by the fact of his existence.  And just as social disapproval works without one individual expressing it; the cop car is a controlled by a drone rather than a human.  

As it happens, Bradbury makes a laughably off the mark prediction when he imagines 2052 with only one cop car for a city of three million.  Little does he know that America was becoming much more crime-ridden than his idyllic 1950s society.  He more accurately predicts the declining literacy of society. When Mead identifies himself to the cop/robot as a writer, which the cop/robot interprets as “No profession,” Mead has to admit that it hardly is a profession anymore, implying that television has edged out the market for magazines and books.  Add the internet, and video, and that is now the reality. 

Furthermore, one is under suspicion when walking as a single man, just as Mead is in “The Pedestrian.”  You have no car apparently, so people regard you as a vagrant or a criminal of some sort. 

When the police/ robot asks if Mead is married, and repeats disapprovingly, “Not married,” it is a mix of 1950s primnes with a dystopian touch. When the cop/ robot laments that there is no wife to use as an “alibi,” as Mead is being detained, it almost implies that Mead is suspected of homosexuality; or at any rate, “regressive tendencies.” 

Finally, when Mead passes his own house in the back of the cop car, it is described as being uniquely illuminated, as compared to the other houses.  This symbolizes Mead’s unique intellect and passion for life, as opposed to the subdued and anesthetized people in his community. 

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