The Pedestrian quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary category best describes "The Pedestrian"?

   • Correct answer: Dystopian science fiction
   • Romanticism
   • Gothic horror
   • Naturalism
   • Regionalism

   Dystopian science fiction imagines a future society that looks orderly but has crushed something essential — exactly the world of A.D. 2053, where crime has vanished, screens have replaced conversation, and a man who walks is carted off for study.

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2. 2

   Question 2. What does Leonard Mead tell the police car he does for a living?

   • Correct answer: A writer, though he has not written in years
   • A night watchman at a shuttered gas station
   • A history teacher at a school across town
   • A repairman who services the viewing screens

   Asked his "business or profession," Mead answers, "I guess you'd call me a writer." But "He hadn't written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more." In 2053 nobody reads, so the job has quietly ceased to exist.

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3. 3

   Question 3. How long has it been since Mead last met another person out walking?

   • Correct answer: Ten years — he has never met another walker
   • Two years — not since the police force was cut
   • Six months — not since he moved into the city
   • Twenty years — not since he stopped writing

   Bradbury writes: "In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time." The detail turns a lonely habit into evidence of a whole society's retreat indoors.

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4. 4

   Question 4. In what year is the story set?

   • Correct answer: A.D. 2053
   • A.D. 2081
   • A.D. 1984
   • A.D. 2153

   The opening paragraph places Mead "alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone" — about a century after Bradbury wrote the story.

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5. 5

   Question 5. Why is the concrete walk buckling, with grass and flowers pushing through it?

   • Correct answer: Nobody walks on it any more, so grass is taking it back
   • An earthquake cracked the pavement across the whole city
   • The city tore it up to widen the highways for more cars
   • Heavy November rains washed the old concrete apart

   "The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass." Bradbury lets the setting do the arguing: a sidewalk nobody uses simply dissolves, and the ruined pavement is the physical proof that public life has ended.

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6. 6

   Question 6. What does "Regressive" mean in this story?

   • Correct answer: Sliding backward toward an earlier, less advanced state
   • Refusing to obey a lawful order given by an officer
   • Suffering from an illness that spreads easily to others
   • Choosing to live entirely apart from other people

   Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies." To this society, walking is not a crime but a throwback — an old human habit that must be studied and corrected like a disease.

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7. 7

   Question 7. What does Bradbury repeatedly compare the dark, screen-lit houses to?

   • Correct answer: A graveyard, with the houses standing as lit tombs
   • A beehive, with the houses humming through the night
   • A forest, with the houses hidden away among trees
   • A harbor, with the houses moored in the still water

   Walking his street is "not unequal to walking through a graveyard," and later Mead pictures "The tombs, ill-lit by television light, where the people sat like the dead." The living are described as corpses while the machine is given a voice — Bradbury reverses what is alive and what is not.

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8. 8

   Question 8. Why is there only one police car left in a city of three million people?

   • Correct answer: Crime has ebbed, so the force was cut after the 2052 election
   • The other cars were wrecked in a storm the previous November
   • The remaining cars patrol only the highways during daylight
   • The city spent its police budget on new public viewing screens

   "Crime was ebbing; there was no need now for the police, save for this one lone car wandering and wandering the empty streets." A society this obedient needs almost no policing — which is itself the most disturbing fact in the story.

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9. 9

   Question 9. How many police cars did the city have before the force was cut?

   • Correct answer: Three cars
   • Ten cars
   • Thirty cars
   • Fifty cars

   "Ever since a year ago, 2052, the election year, the force had been cut down from three cars to one" — three cars for three million people, and even that proved to be too many.

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10. 10

    Question 10. Why does the police car record "No profession" after Mead says he is a writer?

    • Correct answer: Books and magazines no longer sell, so writing counts as nothing
    • Mead refuses to give the car a straight answer about his job
    • He lost his writing license during the election year of 2052
    • The car records only work that is performed inside a home

    "He hadn't written in years. Magazines and books didn't sell any more." The category has simply been deleted — nobody argues with Mead about it. For Bradbury, who lived on magazine stories, the line is personal, and it points straight toward Fahrenheit 451, where books are burned outright.

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11. 11

    Question 11. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • Leonard Mead walks the empty city streets nearly every night.

      Happened

      He tells the car he has done it "Every night for years," sometimes walking for hours and returning only at midnight.

    • Mead wears sneakers so the neighborhood dogs will not bark at him.

      Happened

      He changed to sneakers long ago because "the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings" if he wore hard heels.

    • Mead greets the dark houses out loud as he walks past them.

      Happened

      "Hello, in there," he whispers, and asks the houses what is on Channel 4, Channel 7, and Channel 9.

    • The police car stops Mead within a block of his own home.

      Happened

      He had circled back on a side street and "was within a block of his destination" when the lone car turned the corner.

    • Mead tells the car that he has a viewing screen in his house.

      Didn't happen

      He answers "No," and Bradbury notes that "There was a crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation."

    • Mead is married, and his wife gives the car an alibi for him.

      Didn't happen

      He is not married. "Nobody wanted me," he says with a smile, and the car later remarks, "Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi."

    • There is no one at all inside the police car that stops him.

      Happened

      As he passes the front window he sees that "there was no one in the front seat, no one in the car at all."

    • The back seat of the car is a small barred cell that smells of antiseptic.

      Happened

      It is "a little cell, a little black jail with bars." "It smelled of harsh antiseptic; it smelled too clean and hard and metallic."

    • The car takes Mead to the city jail to spend the night in a cell.

      Didn't happen

      Its destination is the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies — he is being collected as a specimen, not booked as a criminal.

    • Mead's house is the only one in the city with every window lit.

      Happened

      They pass "one house in an entire city of houses that were dark" with "every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness."

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12. 12

    Question 12. What does "Intermittent" mean in this story?

    • Correct answer: Stopping and starting again at irregular intervals
    • Continuing steadily without any pause or break
    • Arranged in a straight line from front to back
    • Hidden from view behind something much larger

    "the dogs in intermittent squads would parallel his journey with barkings" — the barking comes in bursts, then stops. Bradbury uses the same word for the "infrequent lamplights," building a world where light, sound, and life itself flicker on and off.

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13. 13

    Question 13. What is the significance of there being no one inside the police car?

    • Correct answer: Authority has become a machine, with no person left to reason with
    • The officers are crouching in the back seat to observe him closely
    • The car has broken down and drifted into the empty street alone
    • It proves the police have already stopped patrolling the city

    The voice is called "metallic," a "phonograph voice," and finally "the iron voice," and the car decides his fate by "dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes." Mead cannot appeal to mercy, judgment, or common sense, because none of those things is present.

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14. 14

    Question 14. Which statement best expresses the central theme of the story?

    • Correct answer: A society that prizes conformity treats the individual as sick
    • Technology will eventually rise up and destroy its human makers
    • People who break the law must accept the punishment they earn
    • The natural world is far more dangerous than the city it lost

    Mead commits no crime. He is a writer with no viewing screen, no wife, and a habit of walking, and every one of those differences counts against him. Bradbury's warning is that a culture can lose its humanity without violence — simply by giving up the street, the walk, and the book.

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15. 15

    Question 15. What does Mead's brightly lit house symbolize at the end of the story?

    • Correct answer: The last living, thinking mind in a city of darkened tombs
    • The wealth Mead has quietly hidden from his neighbors for years
    • A beacon he leaves burning to guide the police car to him
    • The family waiting inside for him to come back from his walk

    In a city where houses are tombs "ill-lit by television light," Mead's has "every window a loud yellow illumination, square and warm in the cool darkness." The one mind still awake belongs to the man being driven away as abnormal — and when he says "That's my house," no one answers him.

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16. 16

    Question 16. Which device is Bradbury using when the police car whispers, hisses, sighs, and hesitates?

    • Correct answer: Personification, giving human qualities to a machine
    • Flashback, returning to an event from the distant past
    • Allusion, pointing the reader to another famous work
    • Foreshadowing, hinting at events that are still to come

    The car has a "metallic whisper," a "radio throat faintly humming," and it hesitates before answering. Meanwhile the people behind the screens "sat like the dead." The personification of the machine and the deadening of the humans work as one effect.

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17. 17

    Question 17. What does "Alibi" mean in this story?

    • Correct answer: Evidence, or a witness, that a person was somewhere else
    • A written permit allowing a citizen to travel after dark
    • An excuse an officer offers for having made a mistake
    • A record of everywhere a person has traveled that year

    "Now if you had a wife to give you an alibi," says the iron voice — and then the sentence simply stops. Being unmarried leaves Mead with nobody to vouch for him, which in 2053 is itself grounds for suspicion.

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18. 18

    Question 18. What does the name of Mead's destination reveal about this society?

    • Correct answer: Difference is classified as an illness to be studied and cured
    • Criminals are given medical treatment instead of prison terms
    • The city has replaced its courts with a panel of trained doctors
    • Walking after dark has been made a crime punished by a fine

    The "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies" is not a jail. Mead is not being punished for something he did; he is being collected because of what he is. The light already held him "like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest" — a specimen, not a suspect.

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19. 19

    Question 19. How is this story connected to Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451?

    • Correct answer: It grew into the novel, where Clarisse walks at night as Mead does
    • It was written years afterward as a sequel set in the burned city
    • Bradbury reused Leonard Mead as the fireman at the novel's center
    • The novel opens with the very scene of Mead's arrest by the car

    Bradbury wrote "The Pedestrian" in early 1950, before the novella he expanded into Fahrenheit 451. In the novel, Clarisse McClellan walks at night just as Mead does, and she mentions an uncle who was once arrested simply for being a pedestrian — a direct echo of this story.

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20. 20

    Question 20. In what year was "The Pedestrian" first published?

    • Correct answer: 1951
    • 1937
    • 1962
    • 1979

    It appeared on August 7, 1951, in The Reporter, and was collected in The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953.

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21. 21

    Question 21. From what point of view is the story told?

    • Correct answer: Third-person limited, staying close inside Mead's own thoughts
    • First person, narrated by Mead himself many years afterward
    • Second person, addressing the reader directly as "you"
    • Third-person omniscient, entering every character's mind

    The narrator reports Mead's private fancies — the tombs, the imagined Arizona desert — but never looks inside the police car, because there is nothing there to look into. The limited view is what makes the final revelation land.

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22. 22

    Question 22. How does Bradbury describe the cloverleaf highway interchange at night?

    • Correct answer: Silent and empty, like a riverbed gone dry between seasons
    • Roaring with traffic and bright with the lights of gas stations
    • Blocked by wrecked cars the city has never bothered to clear
    • Guarded at every entrance by the last of the city's police cars

    By day the cars swarm like "scarab-beetles," but at night "these highways, too, were like streams in a dry season, all stone and bed and moon radiance." The image returns in the last line, when the car carries Mead "down the empty river-bed streets."

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