Ray Bradbury's 1950 story "There Will Come Soft Rains" features a third-person omniscient point of view. This means that the narrator observes and describes action but does not participate in it and has the ability to understand and communicate the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The narrator's tone is dispassionate as the automated house continues to go about its programmed tasks in the absence of the family it served prior to the nuclear devastation that has claimed their lives.
Though there are no humans in the story, the narrator describes the emotions of the robot mice who emerge to clean up after the family's dying dog tracks mud into the house: "Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience".
The house itself is anthropomorphized, "its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air", as it is consumed by fire at the story's conclusion.
Bradbury, Ray. "The Will Come Soft Rains" Doubleday, 1950.
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