Rain, Rain, Go Away

Although “Rain, Rain, Go Away” might technically be characterized as a science fiction/fantasy story, it bears few of the trademarks that most readers would associate with the genre. Until the story’s final paragraphs, it seems firmly rooted in reality, and the central conflict concerns a fairly mundane aspect of daily life: one family’s interest (and perhaps a bit of jealousy) about who their new neighbors are, which introduces the theme of Curiosity and Judgment. The allusion to a nursery rhyme in the story’s title and the frivolous concerns voiced by Mrs. Wright set a banal tone, wherein the stakes are as low as one neighbor peeking through the blinds at another. This tone is reversed by the story’s conclusion.

The dialogue between the Wrights forms the bulk of the story, illustrating uncomfortable truths about both the Wrights and the objects of their curiosity, the Sakkaros. Because of its structure, the narrative reads more like a play than a traditional story, as the Wrights’ dialogue conveys indirect characterization, action, and intent while Asimov’s narration provides the stage directions. Adding to this effect, the story is divided neatly into four separate dramatic scenes, the first two taking place in the Wrights’ living room on different days, the third at the amusement park (called Murphy’s Park, a reference to Murphy’s Law, which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong), and the fourth in the car and in front of the Sakkaros’ house. By limiting the perspective almost exclusively to what the Wrights say to one another and brief actions on the page, Asimov uses colloquial dialogue, symbolism, and irony to progress the narrative pace, develop themes, and heighten the tension between the Wrights and the Sakkaros.

Given that Asimov wrote quickly and avoided what he considered “flowery” or literary language, his writing is often flavored by the patterns of everyday speech. In “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” the colloquialisms present in the Wrights’ dialogue belie their persona as an average suburban family in the 1950s US. Their use of casual language develops verisimilitude in their conversations, making them seem like a natural married couple.

In addition, the Wrights’ conversations reveal the darker implications associated with 1950s American values, underscoring the story’s two other themes, The Illusion of Perfection and Control and Fear of the Unknown. The first line of the story conveys a sense of Mrs. Wright’s curiosity about—and judgment of—Mrs. Sakkaro as she speaks to her husband: “‘There she is again,’ said Mrs. Wright as she adjusted the venetian blinds carefully” and (several lines later) “Always sunbathing. I wonder where her boy is” (127). Her comment could be taken as innocent curiosity, but the implication is that she’s in fact judging her neighbor for wasting time on sunbathing instead of watching her child or doing domestic chores like putting “a wash on the line” (128), as Mrs. Wright does. While Mr. Wright initially refuses to share in his wife’s curiosity about the neighbors, the two uniformly judge the Sakkaros during their later excursion to Murphy’s Park. The Wrights’ judgment of their neighbors also connects the two other themes of the story given the Wrights’ apparent concern about perfection and control and their fear of people who are clearly somewhat different.

After manipulating her way inside the Sakkaro house, Mrs. Wright describes it in detail to her husband: It was meticulously clean, and Mrs. Sakkaro poured her a drink of water without spilling a drop and handed it to her using a clean napkin. This perfection impresses her, but it also develops a contrast between herself and her husband, who nonchalantly suggests that the woman has impossible standards and “must be a lot of trouble to herself” (129). Later, when he comments that “with a handsome, wealthy man next door, [...] I’ll have impossible standards set for me, too” (131), the text conveys a sense of the strain the Wrights experience in their pursuit of perfection. They’re an affluent family: They can afford a television and an automobile, and they don’t think twice about “treating” their neighbors on the outing to the park. However, they grow increasingly tense and irritated when confronted by the thought that their neighbors, whose origins and activities remain unknown to them, might actually have more advantages than they do.

Although Mrs. Wright is demonstrably frustrated by knowing little about her neighbors, an ironic implication is that the Sakkaros in fact might know a lot about the Wrights. This heightens the contrast and tension between the families. Mrs. Wright is first presented as the watcher, but she might in fact be the one being watched. The fact that Mrs. Sakkaro “knew who [Mrs. Wright] was” (129) and that the Sakkaros “subscribe to all the newspapers” (130), along with Mr. Sakkaro’s assertion that he is “just a student of human nature” (131) all support the inference that they’ve come to observe, and these facts align with the 1950s atmosphere of paranoia that every new neighbor might be a spy.

While the Wrights’ expression of Fear of the Unknown as a theme might be rooted in a xenophobic need to uncover whether their neighbors are Spanish or Japanese, or whether they’re from Arizona or Alabama, the Sakkaros’ use of the pocket-radio and aneroid barometer expresses their own fear of the unknown. Carrying these items with them to the park gives them an illusion of control over getting caught in rainy weather. During the climactic scene when the Sakkaros, “polite but insistent” (132), must race to get home ahead of the rain, Mrs. Sakkaro appears to lose her control for the first time when she wails about the incorrect forecasts.

During this final scene, several literary devices coalesce to heighten the sense that the stakes are high. The symbol of the barometer and the motif of weather, combined with foreshadowing and Asimov’s subtle use of contrast, are essential, as is a sudden switch from colloquial dialogue to more descriptive, image-based narration. As the “Sakkaro youngster pipe[s] up that the barometer [is] falling” (133), the tension in the car is rising. The wind picks up, scattering dry leaves “ominously,” and flashes of lightning begin as they approach their homes:

The Sakkaros tumbled out, faces drawn with tension, muttering thanks, and started off toward their long front walk at a dead run. [...] The heavens opened and the rain came down in giant drops as though some celestial dam had suddenly burst. The top of their car was pounded with a hundred drum sticks, and halfway to their front door the Sakkaros stopped and looked despairingly upward (133).

The descriptive narrative emphasizes the Wrights’ sudden feelings of helplessness and lack of control in the face of their neighbors’ obvious terror. The Sakkaros’ “dead run” is indeed a run for their lives, which end in “three sticky-wet heaps” (133) as they’re reduced to their essence and are nothing but “saccharine” after all. The ending reveals that the Illusion of Perfection and Control is just that, but in an ironic twist, the Wrights (another pun) were wrong about their neighbors: It was they who put the Sakkaros in danger and they who were the “other” to be feared. Another interpretation is that Wrights inadvertently interrupted an alien species’ observation of Earth’s occupants. Either way, the illusion of perfection and control is broken.