The Books I Have Taught: A Sound of Thunder

The Books I Have Taught series is a personal reflection on the books I have taught in my classes. Their experiences often reveal interesting truths, not about the themes necessarily, but more about the outcomes and interactions I had with my students and the various paths it led me down. I hope you enjoy my reflection on the books that I have taught.

Last week I discussed my experience with The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell and today I will discuss the other story I taught alongside, A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury. I have become quite the fan of Ray Bradbury and that is thanks to his short story A Sound of Thunder, and of the two texts, I certain preferred it. My students did as well, though the time travel element did not grab them as much as the being hunted did. I also noticed that the quality of the textual interventions (the creative assessment that I mentioned last week) dropped when a student chose this text. My thoughts were that time travel as a concept is quite difficult, I mean, it sounds straight forward, go to the past, change the future, but there are so many intricacies. I have never been interested in exploring time travel, that may change in the future, but currently, I avoid it. I am just not interested in it either, in terms of narrative arc there are two main paths, either change everything for the better or you can’t change the past without consequences. For the former I feel it is dull and misleading, you cannot change the past and when characters feel that they can play God and just change what happened all it shows is that there are no stakes or consequences and that is boring. It also makes characters seem entitled and makes them much harder to be likeable. The latter path, which includes A Sound of Thunder, can be enjoyable, showing that our attempt to change the past will always make something worse. Though A Sound of Thunder involves unintentional change, it still fits, the problem for me is that it still does not interest me. Perhaps it is because I prefer having stakes and consequences in my writing and I feel that the moment you add the ability to travel back in time you remove them. It is also because I find time travel to be confusing. There are ways to get past it, like being quite simple, a straight up and back like in Bradbury’s story. The other is to be like the episodes of Doctor Who I watched that seem to ignore the complexities and treat each episode as a stand-alone moment, not even trying to have continuity. Now, I do not wish to appear as if the time travel element should be avoided, there are those who love it, both creating it and consuming, but I am simply saying that I am not interested. That said, I would recommend A Sound of Thunder, not only to teach but to read. The concept of the butterfly effect is compelling as is the idea of travelling back in time to kill dinosaurs. It is a text I would happily teach again, though I may change my assessment if my students were at a similar capacity as when I first taught it, perhaps I should have not picked a textual intervention with this particular text. Then again, as I have made it perfectly clear, I cannot go back in time and change this, can I.