The Veldt: Quotes that Reveal Setting

They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

This passage, which appears at the beginning of the story, reveals that the story is set sometime in a more technologically advanced future. It shows that the Hadleys live a highly artificial existence, where they are cared for by robots and sheltered from the outside world. The description of the house’s reactions to the family’s movements as “soft” creates a false sense of security within its walls, which lulls the family but is soon to be disrupted.

Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

This is the introduction to the technological marvel that is the story’s second setting: the nursery of the Happylife Home. This excerpt serves as a transition from one setting to the other. The vivid realness of the African veldt creates a strong contrast to the artificial and somewhat whitewashed domestic comforts of the Happylife Home. Though blank and empty upon the couple’s arrival, the room quickly reveals itself to be complex and potentially dangerous. Though he does not fully comprehend the peril of their situation, George’s instinctual sweating is an anxious reaction to the inherently hostile environment.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures.

The sensory focus here helps establish the characteristics of the veldt of the nursery, the second of two settings in the story. The smell of the air and the lions, the dust in the air, and the sounds of nature could not be more different from the soundproof and sterile environment of the Happylife Home. And though the sensory experience is at first mild and perhaps even pleasant, it quickly gives way to discomfort as the air quality changes and the sounds of hidden animals emerge.

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