As is his signature, Bradbury uses the lyrical language of poetry—such as metaphor, images, and personification—in this cautionary tale about the importance of using technology with the greatest of care.
Despite his blunt, hard-nosed persona, Travis is lyrical in his discussion of the dangers of changing the past. As he explains to the safari-goers, the tiniest change in history could cause massive consequences. For example, he envisions a scenario in which Europe stays uncivilized, saying,
Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming.
Asia is personified as a person growing full, bright, and healthy, while Europe stagnates.
When Eckles asks if the safari guides who came ahead of them to find a dinosaur that was going to die soon saw the outcome of the safari, Travis says that is not the way time travel works. He personifies time as a thinking, reasoning person, and also as a physical human who can step aside as a person can:
Time doesn’t permit that sort of mess—a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside.
The Tyrannosaurus rex is personified in more than one way. At one point, Travis says,
There’s His Royal Majesty now.
Of course, only a human can be a literal king, but Travis is playing on the T. rex as king of the dinosaurs. Further, the dinosaur is personified when its flesh is likened to the chain mail of a human warrior,
sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior.
The personification helps make time travel seem concrete.
The first example of personification in Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder" is used to describe the process of time traveling in the advertisement for the safari: "the old years, the green years, might leap..."as Eckels and his fellow hunters return to the Cretaceous period. Years are inanimate and can only be said to leap in a metaphorical sense.
The time machine the guide and hunters use to return to the habitat of their prey, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, is said to howl, scream, and murmur, all sounds associated with the human voice, as it strains through the reaches of time.
Finally, when the men reach their destination, the Tyrannosaurus Rex itself is described in decidedly human terms: "It ran with a gliding ballet step," and once it had the men in its grip, "the Monster twitched its jewelers hands" as it "fondled at the men." Ballet and jewelers are constructs of the human experience, and fondling is the act of caressing, an action not usually associated with the behavior of reptiles but rather ascribed to humanity.
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