All Summer In A Day

Metaphor is a literary device in which an author likens one thing, person, or idea to another, apparently dissimilar thing, person or idea. One common subset of metaphor is simile, which uses “like” or “as” in making comparisons.

Bradbury employs both simile and metaphor more broadly throughout “All Summer in a Day,” most commonly in connection to the sun; over the course of the story, the sun is compared to gold, a yellow crayon, a lemon, a flower, a penny, a fire in a stove, and an iron. The fact that the sun generates all of these descriptions is significant and highlights humanity’s dependence on the natural world; without the sun, the story suggests, the way we speak and even our capacity for imagination would be impoverished. Bradbury further underscores this point by likening the students to the natural world in passages like this one: “The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun” (Paragraph 7). Like plants depending on the sun for energy, humans depend on nature for both physical and spiritual nourishment.

Bradbury uses repetition several times in “All Summer in a Day,” employing the same word two or three times in quick succession. The most notable instances underscore the seeming interminability of Venus’s storms: “They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily” (Paragraph 82). Similarly, the repetition of the word “mile” in the following passage evokes the rain’s inexorable approach: “Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half-mile” (Paragraph 73). More broadly, the repetitive quality of much of the story’s language perhaps reflects the monotony and sameness of the characters’ lives on Venus, where there’s little to distinguish one day from the next.