What is the theme of "By the Waters of Babylon"?

Central to the understanding of the theme of this short
story is the point of view selected by the author. This masterful dystopian short story
is used a lot in English teaching to give an excellent example of 1st person narration,
where a character is telling you the story directly, and you can only see the action
through their eyes, contrasted with an omniscient narrator who is god-like and
all-seeing and can tell the reader what every character is thinking and feeling. This
form of limited narration is used to great effect by the author as we literally go on
the journey with John, seeing and feeling what he sees and feels, and we gradually piece
together like a jigsaw puzzle what is going on, where we are and what has
happened.

This narrative technique greatly serves to
emphasise the message or theme of this story. We slowly begin to work out the many clues
that there are (such as the names John gives things like "god roads" and what the sign
"ASHING" rally said) and realise that this story is set in a post-nuclear war world
which has been decimated, and the inhabitants have sunk back into the dark ages. John
and his tribe describe a primitive world with many threats and mysteries that they do
not fully understand. However, during the course of his journey and the vision that he
has in "the high towers of the gods" John reflects the moral of the story: "Perhaps, in
the old days, they ate knowledge too fast."

This then is
the brutal thematic warning that the story gives: we live in an era of unprecedented
scientific discovery, yet we risk discovering too much truth too quickly, and
opening some terrible Pandora's Box or using scientific advances before we fully
understand their consequences. One only has to look at the press today and issues such
as stem cell research, the human genome research project and cloning to see that the
danger is still here and Benet's short story is still just as applicable in today's
society. Of course, the tale is an open one, in that it invites its audience to sit up
and take notice of its themes. Whether we respond or not is a decision that is still yet
to be seen.