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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Thunder
Thunder is one of the story’s more obvious motifs. It appears in the title, at the moment the hunters hear the approaching dinosaur, at the dinosaur’s death, and in the story’s concluding line. It is a powerful symbol that not only suggests sound but provides a metaphorical connection to the story’s underlying point: a simple action, unfolding through time, can roll on like thunder, producing extraordinary effects.
Thunder is associated with the dinosaur’s plodding advance, as the jungle “full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs,” falls silent, leaving only “a sound of thunder.” When the Tyrannosaurus falls in death, “[t]hundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it,” the metal path is torn. Then, as the catastrophic consequences become clear after the group returns to the present, Travis lifts his rifle, and “[t]here was a sound of thunder.” Human hubris, greed, and meddling with history lead to inevitable and severe disaster.
Time Travel
Time travel in “A Sound of Thunder” appears as a recurring element that is used both literally and figuratively. As a motif, time travel has fascinated science fiction writers for generations. It helps express a human desire to correct the past or to establish a future people would like to see.
Time travel allows Bradbury to explore ideas of power and responsibility, but it represents far more. The characters of the story literally want to travel in time to hunt game, but the motif serves symbolically to express the futility of the desire to change that which exists. People, the clerk reveals at the story’s outset, have been asking if they can escape to the past, should Deutscher win the election. Eckels frantically longs to return to the past to restore the butterfly. Neither possibility exists; the desire to travel in time expresses a futile denial of reality.
