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did
cry then, though ‘not
at death but at the thought of
not crying
at death, a silly empty
man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her
still more empty’. Emptiness is symbolic in the text, as well as the
electronic-eyed snake that brings it about. The meaning of these
images is an inhuman force purging people of their emotions and
thoughts, of all the attributes of human nature.
The wall is another important symbol in the excerpt. The
stereotyped symbolic meanings of the wall are separation, isolation,
estrangement. Here the symbol assumes a specific aspect: the
automatic walls of Montag’s house are inhabited by numerous
‘relatives’ of soap operas — ‘the gibbering pack of tree-apes, that
said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud’, as the
narrator disparagingly qualifies them. These fictitious characters are,
nevertheless, dangerous, inasmuch as they interfere with the life of
real human beings, diverting them from communication with each
other.
It should be mentioned that the symbol of wall as separation,
isolation, and estrangement is haunting in the excerpt. It is
modified in the last paragraph, where Montag feels he is ‘one of
the creatures electronically inserted between the slots of phone-
color walls, speaking, but the speech not piercing the crystal
barrier. He could only pantomime, hoping she would turn his way
and see him. They could not touch through the glass’.
The most significant and humane memory of Mildred, which
Montag nurses in his heart, amounts to a fantastic image: she is ‘a
girl in a forest without trees, or rather a little girl lost on a plateau
where there used to be trees (you could feel the memory of their
63
Note the graphic means of designating the stream of consciousness
(represented speech).
shapes all about)’. This means that she lives in a make-believe
world, full of phantoms (shapes) of people, but quite desert in
reality.
The paragraph describing Montag’s memories of the
spectacle on the walls abounds in hyperbolic metaphors to render
the devastating impact the noise made on the hero’s mind: ‘A
great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music
bombarded at such immense volume that his bones were almost
shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble
in his head. He was a victim of concussion’.
In the phrase that follows the writer applies a few similes,
repetitions, peculiar strings of hyphenated words and periods to
depict the process of precipitation into emptiness and obscurity,
getting devastated and drained of life: ‘He felt like a man who
had been thrown from off a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat
over a waterfall and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never
quite-touched-bottom-never-never-never-quite-no
not
quite-
touched-bottom… and you fell so fast you didn’t touched the
sides either… never… never… never… quite… touched…
anything’. The metaphoric images of a centrifuge, a washing-
machine and a gigantic vacuum serve to illustrate once again the
evil mechanical power working its disastrous effect on human
psyche. Special note should be made of noise, which is in itself a
symbol of isolation.
Evidently, Mildred has already become a transformed
creature, used to the exuberance of noise, flickering, brisk action,
but drained of genuine human reactions. We find the proof of this
in the episode which Montag’s memory snatches from the past.
Mildred and he were driving together in a car ‘a hundred miles an
hour across town’. Mildred was at the wheel and she bowled
along at precipitous speed. And again the noise — ‘the scream of
the car’ and the music from the radio transistor — symbolically
impedes the understanding between husband and wife. In
response to his request to keep the speed down to the minimum
she ‘pushed it up to one hundred and five miles an hour and tore
the breath out of his mouth’.
Evaluating the ideal message of the text under analysis, we
have good ground to say that it is a warning against the danger of
estrangement and isolation of people in a technocratic world. It
also serves to expose the role of the media, which warp human
personality and subdue it to the established rules.
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