A Sound of Thunder: Summary, Comprehension and Analysis

-Ray Bradbury

Plot (Literal Comprehension)

The story is set in 2055. A hunter named “Eckels” goes on the adventure of a lifetime: travelling back into the past on a prehistoric safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. As the participants wait to depart, they chat about the recent presidential elections, in which an apparently fascist candidate, Deutscher, has just been defeated by the more moderate Keith, to the relief of many people.

After the party arrives in the past, Travis (the hunting guide) and Lesperance (Travis's assistant) warn Eckels and the two other hunters, Billings and Kramer, about the necessity of minimizing their effect on events when they go back, since tiny alterations to the distant past could snowball into catastrophic changes in history. The hunters must stay on a path to avoid disrupting the environment and only kill animals that were going to naturally die at the same time.

Despite his earlier eagerness to begin the hunt, Eckels loses his nerve at the sight of the T Rex. Travis tells him he cannot leave, but Eckels panics and veers off the path. The two guides kill the dinosaur, and shortly afterwards, the tree that would have killed the dinosaur in the absence of human intervention falls on the corpse. Travis' elation quickly changes to fury when they find Eckels and see his muddy boots, which prove he went off the path. Travis threatens to leave Eckels in the past unless Eckels removes the bullets from the dinosaur’s body, as they cannot be left behind.

Upon returning to the present, Eckels notices subtle changes. English words are now spelt strangely, people and buildings are different and, worst of all, Deutscher has won the election instead of Keith. Looking through the mud on his boots, Eckels finds a crushed butterfly, whose death was apparently the cause of the changes. He pleads to Travis to take him back into the past to undo the damage, but Travis refuses and fires his rifle. It is left untold what he shoots, although it is presumed that he kills Eckels. The dark ending reveals that the title not only refers to the "sound of thunder" made by the T-Rex —the story’s final words are, “There was a sound of thunder.”

On the eve of an American presidential election, a party of rich businessmen undertakes a time travel safari to the past to hunt dinosaurs. While the organizers have taken every precaution to minimize the impact of the hunting party in the past, one member violates the rules and leaves the designated path. Upon their return to the present, the group finds that the world has been drastically altered by the seemingly innocuous death of a pre-historic butterfly.

The encounter with the Tyrannosaurus forms the heart of the story with Bradbury’s eloquent prose transporting the reader along with the hunting expedition sixty-million years into the past.

Bradbury’s tale serves not only to entertain but also to speculate on the dangers of time travel. His illustration of a ripple effect on the timeline caused by seemingly unrelated events over a long period of time is not only demonstrated by the climax of the story but is also explained in the context of the story.

While Bradbury does an excellent job illustrating the point, he tends to oversimplify the ripple effect since he assumes the timeline to be static and that by removing the mouse from the equation a void is created that multiplies up the timeline. It seems more likely that the true effect might be equally as dramatic, but unfolding over time in a much more dynamic way. Using Bradbury’s example a lack of mice might mean something other than the fox evolves and thrives on the land, or perhaps the fox adapts to another food source altogether.

The climax of the story involves the return of the hunting party to the office of Time Safari Inc. which still oddly enough still exists, but the language has evolved differently.

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC.

SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.

YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.

WEE TAEK YU THAIR.

YU SHOOT ITT.

More importantly, they discover that the presidential election has been influenced and that the fascist candidate Deutscher was elected president instead of the moderate candidate.

While dramatically effective, the ending virtually contradicts Bradbury’s earlier example of the ripple effect and the mouse. The ending suggests that while the players remain the same, namely the presidential candidates Keith and Deutscher, that their environment and the evolution of the human language has been influenced.

It's an interesting coincidence that Bradbury chose a butterfly to symbolize the chaotic effect multiplied over time. The term Butterfly Effect did not originate with this tale, but rather was coined after MIT research meteorologist Edward Lorenz who discovered in the early 1960s that small variations in his computer model caused wildly divergent results. Lorenz later went on to write a seminal paper on Chaos Theory based on his experience.

Neither Bradbury's time travelers nor the accident prone Homer J. Simpson could predict what consequences their actions would have, but suffice it to say that all actions have consequences big and small. If you are time travelling it might be wise to stay on the path to avoid changing history, but looking forward we should do the opposite. There is no telling how one small action can change the world for the better. As an example, Rosa Parks likely knew the immediate consequences of her actions of refusing to give up her seat on a bus that fateful day on December 1, 1955, but not the far-reaching consequences that would come out of it.

"A Sound of Thunder" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. The story is about a man named Eckels who is a passionate hunter. Eckels travels back in time to kill a dinosaur but his actions alter the balance of nature and change the future.

The author uses a series of unique describing techniques, which make this story full of surprises. In "A Sound of Thunder", Ray Bradbury presents the fact how the small act of human beings at present can change the future drastically. It gives the idea that the "Sound of Thunder" is the consequence of messing with nature and its power, and from breaking the balance in time.

The author tries to describe nature as a delicate and very sensitive thing and he means to say "don't mess with nature and don't break the balance in time". So the author requests us to use natural resources properly and wisely so that our exploitation of nature doesn't create destruction in the future.

The writer's main concern over nature in "A Sound of Thunder" is the way humans are misusing natural resources will surely lead to drastic devastation in the near future so to avoid them, we should learn to properly mobilize these resources.