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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Rima in the Forest:
After confronting their children about the unsettling African veldt landscape that they found in the virtual reality nursery (and after the children claim that no such veldt exists), George and Lydia visit the nursery to see if their children are telling the truth. In this scene, Bradbury includes both imagery and an allusion, as seen in the following passage:
There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.
The imagery here engages different senses at once—the descriptions of the “green, lovely forest,” the “purple mountain,” and the “colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets” all help readers to visualize the scene, while the description of the “high voices singing” helps them to hear it. The note about how the song is one “so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes” also engages readers emotionally.
All of these descriptions are meant to help readers understand how different this virtual reality scene is than the previous one with the desolate African veldt full of hungry lions—the children are clearly aware of the fact that they are doing something “wrong” in letting their violent impulses create the scenery in the nursery and are trying to cover it up with this “lovely” forest scene.
The allusion here is to W. H. Hudson’s 1904 novel Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest, which features a protagonist named Rima, a young girl who lives in the forest in South America. The Rima in this virtual reality scene is clearly a reference to the Rima of Hudson’s tale.
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