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Guilty Until Proven Innocent In The Literary Context

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Guilty Until Proven Innocent in the Literary Context In “All Summer in a Day,” Ray Bradbury argues that an inherent social intolerance among children of those who differ from the “norm” applies until they begin to see and understand Margot’s viewpoint through their unjust maltreatment of her. For instance, the Venus-born children distrust Earth-born Margot’s claim that the sun is to appear for the first time in seven years and her description that “it’s like a penny,” alleging that it is “all a joke” (Bradbury 2). Since the children have never seen the sun, Margot uses the simile of a shiny, bright, orange-colored penny because it is more relatable, but the children find it ridiculous that the small size of a penny can be compared to the enormous size of the sun. The children are instinctively uncomfortable that Margot appears to have knowledge of something that they are unfamiliar with about at the time, so they immediately accuse her of lying and suspect that …show more content…

In addition, despite Margot’s longing to see the sun after years of constant rain, the children express absolutely no concern for her desire and “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” right before the sun is said to come out (2). Inaccurately believing that she is attempting to infect their minds with scientific nonsense, the children feel that Margot deserves to be imprisoned simply because she is different, so they apply violence like barbarians, abusing her naïveté. Essentially, they are so caught up in making unfounded assumptions and inaccurately drawing conclusions deriving from her alien origin

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