Zero Hour

“Zero Hour” looks at the Loss of Innocence among children and adults, focusing heavily on the differences between children’s and adults’ perception of the world. The central conflict is the disconnection between Mrs. Morris and Mink—and more broadly, between parents and their children. The end result is nothing less than the catastrophic: a successful alien invasion and presumably the overthrow of humanity.

Mrs. Morris’s attitude toward Mink and her “game” of Invasion fluctuates throughout the story in a manner fairly typical for a mother dealing with the whims of a child: She is alternately fond and annoyed, indulgent and critical. However, these moods are underscored by a prevailing attitude of dismissal. Whether she’s enjoying Mink’s antics or tired of them, she never takes Mink seriously. Her dismissive attitude points to the complacency adult society shares in the story in general. This can be seen early on, when the third-person narration that has predominantly stuck closely to Mrs. Morris’s point of view opens up to give a more omniscient impression of the world, as held by adults at large:

In a thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, business men in their quiet offices taping their voices, or watching televisors. Rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky. There was the universal, quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there would never be trouble again. Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front (Paragraph 32).

This sense of complacency goes beyond Mrs. Morris’s and other adults’ assumption that the world is safe because of current peaceful geopolitics: It allows them to ignore the fact that their children are warning them of their impending doom. The adults’ complacency is a large part of what makes the irony in the story so palpable; each time they dismiss what the children are telling them, it foreshadows future dangers. As a result, each time Mrs. Morris refuses to take Mink seriously, the reader is cued to take Mink more seriously.

Mink and the other children, in their innocence, exhibit an equally fatal flaw that also leads to the story’s disastrous outcome: naive impressionability. The aliens exploit this trait specifically, as can be seen when Mink, parroting Drill’s words, asks her mother what “impressionable” means. When her mother informs her that “it means—to be a child, dear” (Paragraph 109), it creates a fundamental divide between childhood and adulthood: Adults are complacent and children are impressionable. This means that, although the children’s flaws stem from innocence, neither group is innocent in making the alien invasion possible. Their flaws combine to lead to the story’s tragic and dramatic conclusion.

Bradbury complicates the notion of innocence in “Zero Hour” as part of a larger thematic undertaking: the exploration of alienation. There are several types of alienation present in the story, most notably Generational Alienation, as each group’s way of seeing and thinking is alien to the other. One way that Bradbury demonstrates this is through the story’s dialogue, in which both Mrs. Morris and Mink make sweeping statements about the nature of adults and children. Over lunch, Mink delivers a bit of spirited invective about why she dislikes older children: “They make fun. They’re worse than parents. They just won’t believe in Drill. They’re so snooty, cause they’re growing up. You’d think they’d know better. They were little only a coupla years ago” (Paragraph 102). Not only does this dialogue serve to explain Mink’s heated interaction with an older boy and later dismissal of a girl who she claims “grew up all of a sudden” (Paragraph 146), it clarifies exactly how Mink and the other children view adults: short-sighted, but perhaps more understandably so, since adults are so much farther away from being “little.” Along similar lines, when Mrs. Morris complains that “no matter what age you live in children hate water behind their ears” (Paragraph 97), she is over-generalizing the fundamental silliness of children, implying that she finds the concerns of childhood frivolous. Mrs. Morris and Mink are, on the surface, conversing with each other—but on a deeper level, they’re having separate conversations that the other can’t hope to understand.

Mrs. Morris’s tendency to paint children in broad strokes extends past her dialogue and into her inner thoughts. Toward the end of the day, when feeling particularly frustrated with the mercurial way Mink is behaving, she ruminates: “Strange children, did they ever forget or forgive the whippings and the harsh, strict words of command? [...] How can you ever forget or forgive those over and above you, those tall and silly dictators?” (Paragraph 157). Here, Mrs. Morris comes very close to lighting upon an essential truth: that the children find the adults as inscrutable as the adults find them. While she tiptoes the memory of what it feels like to be a child subjected to adult whims, she falls short of the mark, tragically missing the opportunity to understand and perhaps prevent her fate.