Picture moving from earth only to live on Venus
where there is no sunshine other than the time here it stops raining and the
sun comes out for two wondrous hours. In the short story, “All Summer In A Day,”
by Ray Bradbury, the main character is constantly bullied and teased by her
classmates for being different and knowing what the sun actually looks like. Then her classmates play a terrible trick on
her and lock her in a closet the two hours the sun was supposed to come out and
forgot to let her out when the sun came out so she missed it. Bullying is a
major theme in this story, as well as other stories, for several reasons.
When Margot moved with her family from Earth to
Venus, her classmates bullied her because she was different than they are. When
the Author, Ray Bradbury, said, “They hated her pale snow face, her waiting
silence, her thinness, and her possible future,” it really shows how her classmates judged her
because she was different than them.
This quote proves how cruel her classmates were to her, only because
she’d been lucky enough to remember the sun and that she would soon go back to
Earth where she could see it for days and days.
Margot’s classmates didn’t like her because she was different
and this led to the constant bullying that Margot received daily. Although all
the bullying and teasing that her classmates did to her, there was one instance
that really proves how bullying was the main theme. The quote, “They surged
about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then
crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the
door,” describes when her classmates were so horribly cruel to her and locked
her up in a closet for the two hours the sun would be out for the next seven
years. When they did this it really proved to me how bullying was so
significant in this short story.
The book, What
My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya
Sones shares the same theme of bullying as “All Summer in A Day” had as
well. What My Mother Doesn’t Know is
your typical beauty and the beast story and consists a popular boy and a bullied
and tormented guy, Murphy. The popular girl falls for him and she realizes how
much people bully him. So she begins wonder if she wants to associated with him and
bullied the way he is. A quote that bests describes the theme is “When someone
at school acts like a dork the other kids say, What a Murphy.” The quote shows
how Murphy has just become a joke at school and everyone bullies him. Something
that connects these two stories, besides theme is Margot and Robin are both
outcasts and are constantly being made fun of and put down because of looks, or
where they’re from.
Not only does What
My Mother Doesn’t Know share the same theme of bullying as “All summer
in a Day,” but the book Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson has that
same theme also. When everyone gangs up
on Melinda and leaves her without a friend or anyone for her to talk to about
what really happened to her, it really
proves that the main theme is bullying. “All Summer In A Day,” not only shares
the same theme as Speak, but it also shares the same struggles that the
main characters go through when they have no friends to talk to about
anything.
It doesn’t matter if you live on Venus or if you live here on earth,
bullying can happen anywhere. It takes ignoring people, physically hurting
someone and making up your mind about someone before you get to know them to be
a bully. Once you learn to recognize the signs of bullying and what it takes to
be a bully, you can reduce the amount of bullying that goes on around you. For
several meanings a major theme in the short story, “All Summer In A Day,” by
Ray Bradbuy and many other books is bullying.
