Stumbling in the dark: Ray Bradbury's Pedestrian and the politics of the night

This article explores Ray Bradbury's short story 'The Pedestrian' (1951), which is set in Los Angeles a century after its publication, as a dystopian parable both of the danger of totalitarianism and the alienation implicit in a culture centred on the automobile, a parable in which the protagonist's habits of solitary strolling in the streets of the city at night offer redemptive, if not utopian possibilities. It relates 'The Pedestrian' both to David H. Keller's 'The Revolt of the Pedestrians' (1928) and to seminal events in Bradbury's own life, before comparing it with the latter's famous novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), for which in some respects it represents an initial draft. It argues that both of Bradbury's fictions posit the figure of the social scapegoat as the potential origin of a new social order.