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Have you ever wondered if it was even possible to change time itself? Well, in the short story called “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury , the past and future can be changed by time traveling to the past and making changes that shouldn’t be made. The topic is a very unrealistic concept and is a conflict much larger than just Man vs Nature. In the story, the whole space-time continuum is being reverted unnaturally. The main protagonist, Eckels is anticipating a riveting Safari to the past with fellow hunters to hunt the king of the monsters: The Tyrannosaurus Rex. While traveling in the time machine, the two Safari Heads often warn the men not to step off of the “Path”, because there will either be dire consequences, or the death of whoever is responsible for the “crime”. Upon arrival, Eckels great underestimates the size of his prey and hunts carelessly until the real thing is summoned right in front of them; this is when thing go off of the path. Going back in time is an extreme action because if you change something rather insignificant in the past, you can alter history as a whole. An infinitesimally small change done to the past can add up in un-proportional ratios and result in an unchangeable future. What were the intentions of the author and what did he do to create an interesting theme.

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In the story, “A sound of Thunder”, by Ray Bradbury, the author believes that changing the past minimally can have a conspicuous effect on the future. Upon exiting the time machine, Eckels asks the Safari Head Travis on why it’s so important to not step off of the path that separates the past from the present. Travis responds by giving him a realistic example; “’Say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?…Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations”’ (Bradbury 226). Travis, the prominent Safari Head of the group explains the entirety of the theory to Eckels to prevent the happening of it in reality. In this part of the book, Travis’s theory supports the fact that if something is altered in the past, there would be a series of negative effects in the future. Say, Eckels steps on a small creature, generations that came from one creature would be destroyed. The author is trying to emphasize the importance of keeping things intact in the past and that changing something will affect the influence of that particular thing on other things. For example, there is a rabbit who is supposed to live for another 3 years, but instead was shot by a hunter from the past. The rabbit is dead, and its interactions that were supposed to be made in the time span of 3 years are destroyed. The detailed explanations that the author included were to elaborate on the topic, Time Travel, and enroll it along with his personal perspective on time travel. Time travel is a very vague and indefinite concept, but along with a theme and a core focus such as the effects of it on the present world, it can interweave in a hypothetical, and somewhat philosophical tale of what the author thinks of the future world when time travel becomes a reality. Later in the story, when their prey, the tyrannosaurus rex approaches them. Eckels steps off of the path and is later punished by having to take the bullets out of the cold and putrid corpse of their prey. The real consequences appear after being unnoticed when the men travel back into the present and “[Eckels] fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!” …Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead” (Bradbury 236). In this line of the story, it appears that the warnings Travis has told Eckels were in fact true and now that this reality has happened, Eckels will regret ever going back in time. After their arrival, the author rewrites a sign advertising Time Safari in a version that seems to be very misspelled, as if the deprivation of knowledge or the change of language were caused due to the death of a butterfly. The author’s intentions were clearly to emphasize the point that minor changes in the past can lead to grim and noticeable consequences.