Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Veldt’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Veldt’ is a short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1952 collection of linked tales, The Illustrated Man . The story concerns a nursery in an automated home in which a simulation of the African veldt is conjured by some children, but the lions which appear in the nursery start to feel very real. ‘The Veldt’ can be analysed as a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, especially when it threatens the relationship between parents and their children.

‘The Veldt’: plot summary

Married couple George and Lydia Hadley live in their Happylife Home which has all sorts of automated machinery to do everything for them around the house. The story begins with Lydia telling George to go and look at their nursery, as it is different from how it was. When they both step inside the nursery together, the simulated African veldt, complete with the smell, sight, and sound of lions and other animals, seems more real than it had before. George can feel the hot sun on his face as though he’s actually in Africa.

In light of their unsettlingly real experience in the nursery, Lydia insists that George lock the nursery for a few days so their children, Wendy and Peter, cannot play in there. Lydia even suggests shutting down the house for a few days so that she can do the housework, instead of letting the automated machinery do it for them.

That evening, during dinner, George feels the urge to go into the nursery and examine it. All you have to do to make animals appear is to imagine them and they are conjured before you as if they’re really there. George tries to summon Aladdin and his magic lamp, but instead the lions that he has imagined into being remain standing before him.

Lydia suggests that their children have filled the room with so many thoughts of Africa and death that the room’s ‘settings’ have got stuck on that mode.

When their children, Peter and Wendy, get home from their party, George demands to know what they have done to the nursery. But the children deny that the room is like Africa, and when George goes to investigate with them, sure enough the room is instead a beautiful forest, with no lions. However, George does locate an old wallet of his, which has apparently been chewed by a lion.

George tells his wife he regrets buying them the nursery, but his wife tells him it was designed to help them work through their neuroses. That night, they hear screams from downstairs and realise the children have broken into the nursery. When George suggests that they shut down the whole house for a month, Peter recoils at the idea.

George invites their friend David McClean, a psychologist, to come and inspect the nursery. David is so repulsed by the nursery that he advises George to tear the room down and send his children to him for daily treatment over the next year so they can recover.

He tells George that the nursery has gone from being a space where children’s thoughts would be captured on the walls so they could be analysed to a room which encourages destructive thoughts within the children.

George switches off the nursery, much to the anger of the children; even Lydia asks him to turn it back on for a short while. But instead he goes around the house and switches off all of the machinery.

In retaliation, the children lock their parents inside the nursery and switch it back on. As the lions advance on them, they realise the animals have become real. They scream, and recognise that the screaming they’d heard before were their own screams, which the children had longed to hear.

The story ends with David McClean arriving to speak to the children. Wendy and Peter, who are drinking tea while seated in the nursery, which is now displaying a serene scene, tell him their parents will be here soon. But the vultures flying overhead suggest that the parents have been devoured by the lions.

‘The Veldt’: analysis

A recurring theme in Ray Bradbury’s short stories is the danger of becoming overly reliant on technology so that we lose touch with what makes us human.

In ‘The Veldt’, handing over the job of parenting to the house has fatal consequences for George and Lydia, whose house provides all the ‘creature comforts’ they could desire, but at the cost of the natural, innate bond between parent and child. As the psychologist tells them, the house has replaced the parents in their children’s affections. When they surrendered that bond with their children and handed it over to the house, they created a monster.

In this respect, a comparative analysis of ‘The Veldt’ alongside another of Bradbury’s most celebrated stories, ‘ There Will Come Soft Rains ’, could yield some productive commentary on Bradbury’s attitude to technology and the ways in which it threatens our bonds with each other.

In that story, a fully automated house is left deserted, making breakfast for its human inhabitants who have perished in a nuclear war. In ‘The Veldt’, the human destruction is on a more local, domestic scale, but it is similarly a result of our reliance on technology.

In terms of raising children, this issue also carries other implications. Wendy and Peter are clearly named after the characters from J. M. Barrie’s celebrated story for children, Peter Pan , but the naming turns out to be ironic, since Peter Pan was a boy blessed with (condemned to?) perpetual childhood, ‘the boy who would never grow up’, whereas Bradbury’s Peter has already grown up too quickly.

As George comments to his wife, their children come and go as they please, head out to parties on their own and return when they wish: in many respects, the roles of parent and child have become reversed.

But they have also lost the boundless creativity which, Bradbury would doubtless agree, should be fostered in children from a young age. When they are creative and imaginative, their thoughts are destructive rather than creative, bringing to life their animosities towards their parents in a weird and unsettling twisting of the idea of ‘play’.

The nursery – which should, as the psychologist comments, be a space where they paint their thought-pictures upon its walls – has become a room of destruction and death. In a telling remark to his father, Peter objects to the shutting down of the house’s automated features because, rather than learning to paint for himself – a symbol of human creativity – he wants to do nothing except ‘look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?’

Bradbury clearly had a deep unease about such willing passivity: see his short story ‘ The Pedestrian ’, in which a whole city has happily surrendered its activity in favour of staying indoors every evening and passively consuming hours of television. And such anxieties obviously feed into Fahrenheit 451 , in which books are banned not because of what they say, but because of what they represent: free expression and critical thinking rather than passive consumerism.

‘The Veldt’ might be analysed in terms of the uncanny , Sigmund Freud’s theory of the strange feeling we experience when we find the familiar within the unfamiliar, or the unfamiliar lurking within the familiar. One of the classic examples which Freud cites is the idea of inanimate objects coming to life, such as dolls, or the carved crocodiles on a table which start to move.

The lions in the nursery are clearly uncanny in that they are meant to be simulations but suddenly, somehow, become flesh-and-blood creatures, with devastating consequences for the parents in the story. Bradbury’s skill is in tapping into our fears of uncanny phenomena in order to deliver a ghastly cautionary tale about our relationship with technology.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt

Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 18, 2022

Originally published as the first narrative in a collection entitled The Illustrated Man , “The Veldt” was also one of three stories from the book adapted for a film version in 1969 and eventually published in play form, although neither of these is considered a critically important version of the original work. While usually thought of exclusively as a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury is also a haunting essayist and an astonishingly lyrical poet. In his creative work as well as in his interviews, he makes no bones about the fact that, despite his fascination with other worlds and other times, he is at heart a technophobe, loving intensely this Earth in all its magnificence and worried— already in the early fifties—by the effects of increasing mechanization on the planet. One preeminent Bradbury scholar, George Edgar Slusser, has commented that “to Bradbury, science is the forbidden fruit, destroyer of Eden” (“Biography”). Thus, in “The Veldt” we see that Bradbury mixes elements of science fiction with a strong—nay, a terribly frightening— warning about humankind’s destruction of Earth’s creatures and resources.

the veldt literary essay

Author Ray Bradbury attends Nineth Annual Hemingway Contest on March 10, 1986 at Harry’s Bar and Grill in Century City, California./GoodReads

Set in some unidentified future time, the story takes place over approximately 12 hours in a house apparently not unlike the one described so clearly in “ There Will Come Soft Rains ,” arguably Bradbury’s most famous story. “The Veldt” focuses on the home’s “nursery,” a space with thought-controlled holographic plasma walls, capable of creating visual illusions and their accompanying appropriate sounds and scents, which has been hijacked by the owners’ 10-year-old twins, named, interestingly enough, Peter and Wendy. Pervading the story is a growing sense of dread as we learn that now only the children are capable of controlling the walls of the nursery, which they have locked into the hot oppressiveness of the African veldt, complete with all its flora and fauna, including a pride of lions, which takes the story to its grisly but inevitable end.

There are those who interpret “The Veldt” as dealing with human beings who use technology to perpetrate evil or as indicating that our increasing dependence on machines instead of on each other creates barriers between family members, but underlying both the science fiction and the human relationship aspects of the story is Bradbury’s environmental message: Nature cannot—will not—be controlled. The twins have learned that lesson, but the parents, and most of the rest of the “civilized” world, apparently do not have a clue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “Biography—Bradbury, Ray (Douglas) (1920– ).” In Contemporary Authors. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2004. Bradbury, Ray. “The Veldt.” In The Illustrated Man. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1987. “Introduction.” In Ray Bradbury, Modern Critical Views Series, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2000. McNelly, Willis E. “Two Views: Ray Bradbury—Past, Present, and Future.” In Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, edited by Thomas D. Clareson, 167–175. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1983.

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Consumer Culture and Technology Theme Icon

Consumer Culture and Technology

“The Veldt” portrays a futuristic society in which things, especially consumer goods, have gained a life of their own. In the name of convenience and contentment, technology fulfills people’s every need, reducing humans to passive beings who only eat, breathe, and sleep. Bradbury, who wrote this story in 1950, was responding to the post-World War II consumer culture that was rapidly developing as the U.S. economy boomed. It’s remarkable how closely his extrapolation of American…

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“Too Real” Reality

In Bradbury’s story, virtual reality has powerfully altered the Hadley family’s perception of reality. In the Happylife Home, this technology takes the form of a “ nursery ”, a room for the Hadleys’ children that immerses them in any scene the can imagine. For the children Wendy and Peter , the power of virtual reality reaches the point where they would much rather interact with the nursery than with the real world. As George points…

“Too Real” Reality Theme Icon

Human Nature

The Happylife Home is Bradbury’s futuristic vision of technology nearing its zenith. It may seem strange, then, that the predominant image in the story is that of an African veldt . The juxtaposition between advanced technology and this quintessential image of nature merits investigation. Technology and Nature are usually imagined as polar opposites. The development of technology, we might say, has allowed us to become masters of nature. In “The Veldt,” the nursery allows the…

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Death of the Family

On the most basic level, “The Veldt” is about a family going through the typical problems that arise in family life. George and Lydia are parents who spoil their children, and then try to discipline them by taking away the toys they originally spoiled them with. In response, Wendy and Peter begin to hate their parents. The difference between the Hadleys and a real family is that the Hadley children’s toys are much more powerful…

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Ray Bradbury: Short Stories

By ray bradbury, ray bradbury: short stories summary and analysis of "the veldt".

In "The Veldt," George and Lydia Hadley are the parents of Wendy and Peter Hadley , and they live in a technologically driven house that will do everything for its inhabitants - transport you upstairs, brush your teeth, cook the food, and clean the house. The story begins when Lydia asks George if he's noticed anything wrong with the nursery, the most expensive and exciting room of the house. The glass walls have the ability to project the landscape and environment of any place that the mind of the visitor wishes. During this particular visit, George and Lydia are surrounded by the African countryside. In the distance, lions are licking the bones of their prey clean. The images are so startlingly lifelike that when the holographic lions begin to charge, George and Lydia run for the door to escape.

Outside of the nursery, Lydia comments that she heard screams coming from the room earlier in the day, but George tries to ease her worries. He wants to believe that the children are psychologically healthy, not that they are fixated on blood and violence. After all, one of the selling points of the room was that the children would be able to use the room as an outlet for their emotions, and the places that the room visited would provide information for the adults who were curious about the young minds. Lydia senses that something dark is brooding in her children's brain. As they sit down to dinner, which is all provided through the house's technology, George suggests shutting down the house and living in a simpler manner, something he has suggested before and used as a punishment for his children. Lydia is thrilled by the idea because she feels as if she has been replaced for the house. The house is the mother, wife, and homemaker that she once was, and she feels purposeless.

George visits the room again for further observation, and he attempts to change the scenery to Aladdin. Alas, nothing changes, and he begins to think that his children have maintained control over the environment, furthering his concern that his children have an unhealthy obsession with the veldt. When they arrived home from a carnival, he decided to ask them about the persistence of the savannah, but they tried to deny it. Wendy goes into the room to inspect it, and when she returns she reports that it is no longer Africa, but rather woodland. George and Lydia are highly skeptical, and they believe that Wendy entered the room and changed it after they returned from the fair. One of the clues that make George believe the room was altered was his wallet on the floor of the nursery, smelling of hot grass and showing teeth marks.

As George and Lydia go to bed, they decide to call David McClean and have him come over to inspect the nursery. The sounds of screams travel from downstairs - Wendy and Peter have left their bedrooms and gone back to the nursery. Lydia comments, "Those screams - they sound familiar." At the end of the story, they will find out why they sound so familiar. The next morning, Peter questions his father about the future of the nursery. "You aren't going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?" asked Peter. George explains that they were thinking of shutting the house down for a while and living in a more traditional manner, and Peter responds poorly. Peter vaguely threatens his father and stomps off.

When David McClean inspects the room, he admits that it gives him a bad feeling. George presses him for more concrete facts, but David can only offer him his intuition. He says to George, "This doesn't feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment." Why, exactly, are things so dire? The children are furious with their parents and the idea of the nursery being taken away. McClean tells George that the house has replaced him and his wife, and now the house is far more important than their biological parents. McClean believes that there is "real hatred" in the scenes of the nursery, and George decides to turn it off instantly. As they leave, McClean picks something up on the ground - Lydia's scarf. It's bloody.

George told his children that the nursery would be turned off, as well as the rest of the house. They began screaming and throwing a hysterical fit. They begged for more time in the nursery, and Lydia suggested that turning it off so suddenly was not a good idea. At first George resisted the idea of turning it back on, but eventually he relented and allowed the children a little bit more time. George and Lydia went upstairs to get ready for the vacation while the children played in the nursery one final time.

From their bedroom, George and Lydia’s children call them to quickly come downstairs. They ran downstairs but didn't see their children anywhere. When they couldn't find them, they looked for them in the nursery. The savannah and the lions had returned to the nursery, and the door slammed behind them. They called for Wendy and Peter, but they had locked the door from the outside. They beat against the door but no one opened them, and the lions began to surround them and move closer. Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed, and suddenly they realized why the screams sounded so familiar. David McClean arrived shortly after to greet everyone, but he did not see George and Lydia. The children sat and ate lunch in the nursery, looking out on the water hole and the lions feasting in the distance. "Where are your father and mother?" asked David, and Wendy simply responded, "Oh, they'll be here directly." As they watch the vultures swoop down, Wendy asks, "A cup of tea?" and the story ends.

In this dark and troubling story, Bradbury writes a precautionary tale of the advance of technology and the importance of maintaining communication during these technological advances. In the Hadley's "Happy-life Home," the house fulfills all of their needs and desires. While at first this was a major advantage to the Hadley's and a primary reason for the desirability of the home, it has now become a point of stress rather than happiness. Both parents struggle to find fulfillment in their everyday life because the house has replaced their traditional roles as mother and father. At different points in the story, both parents contemplate going back to a "normal" house even though it would mean extra work and tasks for them everyday.

Bradbury juxtaposes the advance of technology with the decline in interpersonal communication. The Hadley children, Wendy and Peter, are both manipulative and stubborn. They fail to have any positive communications with their parents during the story. Many of their interactions end in a thinly veiled threat or a strategically placed crying session in order to secure what they want. While this may not be entirely uncommon behavior of children, the parents are unable to respond appropriately to their children. Stripped of their parenting duties, they have forgotten how to communicate with their children. In every interaction between parents and children, the children receive what they want. These negative interactions emphasize the importance of inter-family communications.

George and Lydia attribute their lack of an ability to communicate with their children to the house's automation, but this brings to light the idea that parenting is more than simply providing your child with everything he or she would like. The Hadley's believed that this would solve their problems, but it has only caused more problems. The house that provides everything has rendered them unnecessary and inconvenient. Somehow, the Hadley's must find a way to reassert themselves in their children's eyes and provide them with a form of support that is not possible to receive from the house.

As George and Lydia struggle to find their identity as parents, they are simultaneously struggling with their personal identities. Lydia confesses to George that she would much rather turn the house "off" and go back to giving the children baths, cooking dinner, and doing the laundry. Lydia's concern for finding a purpose highlights a broader human concern to find importance in your daily tasks and the need to think that you are making progress and contributing to society. This basic need does not cease with the advent of automation and technology, according to Bradbury.

Finally, the science of psychology plays a major role in the story. It is revealed that the original purpose of the nursery was to study the minds of children, for what they left on the wall would provide a glimpse into the inner workings of their minds. Even though George and Lydia have hunches that something is wrong with the never changing African veldt, it is not until psychologist David McClean arrives that they know for sure that something is seriously wrong. He insists that the house be shut down immediately and the children start psychological treatment as soon as possible. Bradbury positions psychology as a possible treatment for the children's dire state.

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Ray Bradbury: Short Stories essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of select short stories by Ray Bradbury.

  • Ray Bradbury Hates Technology: Analyzing "The Pedestrian"
  • "There Will Come Soft Rains": From Poem to Story
  • Contextual Study of Science Fiction Texts, and Intertextual Ideas that Transcend Time: "The Pedestrian," "Harrison Bergeron," and Equilibrium
  • The Power of Technology: Comparing "Rocket Summer," "There Will Come Soft Rains," and Fahrenheit 451
  • “…The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton …”:A Postmodern Reading of Ray Bradbury’s “The Will Come Soft Rains”

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the veldt literary essay

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Imagery, Metaphor, and Foreshadowing in Bradbury’s "The Veldt"

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the veldt literary essay

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Satire is defined as “the use of irony , sarcasm , or ridicule in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.” (Webster’s College Dictionary). Bradbury makes extensive use of satire to mock the delusions of his characters and the absurdity of their technological addiction. Bradbury describes a chair that responds to a person’s distress by rocking her, a kitchen that spontaneously cooks food, and machines that tie shoes and brushes teeth. The “picture painter,” owned by Peter, is a sign that creativity has been abolished. Characters speak to the machines as if they are people: Peter wails at the ceiling “as if he was talking to the house, the nursery” (251).

Bradbury satirizes the consumerist tendencies in mid-20th-century American society by depicting the Happy-life Home as a coveted status symbol (“Every home should have one” (241). The name of the home itself is satirical, suggesting a complacent and childish self-satisfaction. Bradbury says that the home “was good to them” (239), a phrase that mocks the materialistic tendency to equate goodness with comfort.

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  1. The Veldt Summary & Analysis

    The parents reach the nursery, the most expensive and sophisticated feature of the Happylife Home.Before their eyes, the blank walls of the nursery transform into a three-dimensional African veldt. George feels the intense heat of the sun and begins to sweat. He wants to get out of the nursery, saying that everything looks normal but that it is "a little too real," but Lydia tells him to wait.

  2. A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury's 'The Veldt'

    By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'The Veldt' is a short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1952 collection of linked tales, The Illustrated Man.The story concerns a nursery in an automated home in which a simulation of the African veldt is conjured by some children, but the lions which appear in the nursery start to feel very real.

  3. Analysis of Ray Bradbury's The Veldt

    Home › Literature › Analysis of Ray Bradbury's The Veldt. Analysis of Ray Bradbury's The Veldt By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 18, 2022. Originally published as the first narrative in a collection entitled The Illustrated Man, "The Veldt" was also one of three stories from the book adapted for a film version in 1969 and eventually published in play form, although neither of these is ...

  4. The Veldt Theme Essay: [Essay Example], 1123 words

    The Veldt Theme Essay. In Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," the theme of the dangers of technology and its impact on human relationships is explored in a futuristic setting. The story follows a family living in a technologically advanced home with a nursery that can manifest any scene the children imagine.

  5. The Veldt Critical Essays

    Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on "The Veldt," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2005. Cite this page as follows: ... "The Veldt - Bradbury's Use of Literary Devices."

  6. The Veldt Study Guide

    Where Written: Los Angeles. When Published: 1950, published originally under the title "The World the Children Made". Literary Period: Science fiction/Fantasy. Genre: Short story/Science fiction/Fantasy. Setting: The Happylife Home, a futuristic suburban house. Climax: Wendy and Peter murder their parents.

  7. The Veldt Analysis

    The story makes several references to literature and pop culture. Wendy and Peter are named after the characters in J. M. Barrie's classic novel Peter Pan (initially a play, novelized in 1911).

  8. The Veldt Critical Overview

    Essays and criticism on Ray Bradbury's The Veldt - Critical Overview ... of a literary establishment other wise (sic) unwilling to admit any quality in the technological and scientific projections ...

  9. The Veldt Themes

    Death of the Family. On the most basic level, "The Veldt" is about a family going through the typical problems that arise in family life. George and Lydia are parents who spoil their children, and then try to discipline them by taking away the toys they originally spoiled them with. In response, Wendy and Peter begin to hate their parents.

  10. Ray Bradbury: Short Stories Summary and Analysis of "The Veldt"

    Ray Bradbury: Short Stories study guide contains a biography of Ray Bradbury, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of select short stories. ... In "The Veldt," George and Lydia Hadley are the parents of Wendy and Peter Hadley, and they live in a technologically driven house that will do ...

  11. Theme of The Veldt: [Essay Example], 685 words GradesFixer

    The short story "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury is a thought-provoking exploration of the consequences of technology on human relationships and the loss of innocence. The main theme of the story revolves around the dangers of over-reliance on technology and the impact it can have on family dynamics. Through the use of symbolism, irony, and ...

  12. The Veldt Analysis: [Essay Example], 688 words GradesFixer

    The Veldt Analysis. "In Ray Bradbury's short story ""The Veldt,"" the author explores the dangers of technology and its impact on human relationships. The story takes place in a futuristic world where a family lives in a technologically advanced house that caters to their every need. The children, Peter and Wendy, become obsessed with the house ...

  13. The Veldt Essay Topics

    Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

  14. Imagery, Metaphor, and Foreshadowing in Bradbury's "The Veldt": [Essay

    By using foreshadowing, imagery, and metaphor in the short story when parents find the scream belong to them, the wallet is bloody but no one get hurt, and nursery is a better mother, the author tries to tell us like Sword of Damocles (Damocles think as with a great man of power and prestige, dithyrambs dionysius, really lucky.

  15. Analysis of literary devices and figurative language in "The Veldt

    Summary: In "The Veldt," Ray Bradbury employs various literary devices and figurative language, including vivid imagery to create an immersive setting, personification to give the house lifelike ...

  16. The Veldt Literary Devices

    The Veldt. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.