“The Pedestrian” is a dystopian short story that describes one night in the life of Leonard Mead, resident of an unnamed city in the year 2053. Mead enjoys walking the city streets alone every night. As he walks the empty streets, he passes the homes of other citizens, who are inside watching television.

In the end, Leonard Mead is ordered into the car and told that he will be taken to the Psychiatric Center for Research of Regressive Tendencies. On the way to the center, the car passes Leonard Mead’s house, the only house in the city that is brightly lit.

Unfortunately, a completely automated police car stops Leonard during his nightly walk and questions him before demanding that he get into the back of the police car. In Bradbury’s dystopian future society, being a pedestrian is suspicious, and this results in Mr. Mead’s arrest.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” Leonard Mead lives in a reclusive society, where the citizens are completely consumed with technology and remain indoors to watch television throughout the night.

Ray Bradbury was clearly prescient about some of the looming problems of the future. His theme in “The Pedestrian” is that a society in which technology dominates lives leads to conformity, lack of imagination, and individualism.

In “The Pedestrian”, Bradbury’s purpose is to illustrate how the rise of technology threatens our individuality as people.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story The Pedestrian, the portrayal of the main character Leonard Mead and his love for irrelevant, bygone practices, such as writing and going on walks, locked in conflict with the futuristic civilization that he lives in, who are all obsessed with anything that appears on their screens.

Crucially, Mead is not sad or lonely – he finds humour in his situation, enjoys his aloneness, and is proud of it: “’Nobody wanted me,’ said Leonard Mead with a smile.” The Police Car is characterised as devoid of any human characteristics: “It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clear and hard and metallic.

Leonard Mead

The sidewalks are buckling and crumbling because they haven’t been taken care of and fixed because no one is using them. We are told that the city is silent because everyone is watching television and that it has a population of three million with only one police car left to patrol. 2.

Mead’s society is controlled by a hedonistic worldview to consume entertainment, and anybody that hasn’t bought into that worldview is sent to a psychiatric ward for “help.” Robots, in the form of televisions and a remote controlled police car seem to have control of this world.