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11.
Review the language of the selection (its syntactical
peculiarities, choice of words, graphical means, punctuation,
length of paragraphs, type). Characterize the author’s idiom,
find the traits of American English.
A sample of interpretation
The excerpt under analysis is taken from the famous R.
Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’, the novel written in 1953. The setting
of the novel is a highly technocratic future, when the written word is
forbidden, and books are burnt. The hero of the novel, Guy Montag,
is a fireman who comes through his acquaintance with a girl from a
relict book-keeping family, to a total life overturn and joins a group
of rebels, memorizing entire works of literature and philosophy
and thus protecting the heritage of human spirit.
The excerpt subject to analysis features the hero’s awakening
to the reality around him, as he begins to think and resent the
status quo for the first time in his life. To convey Montag’s first
rambling thoughts Bradbury aptly uses interior monologues,
which in the broad context may be seen as a stream of
consciousness.
It
is
unstructured
reflection,
sometimes
determined by a preceding thought, sometimes spontaneous (e.g.,
the question where they had first met with his wife), sometimes
prompted by an outer event (e.g., when Mildred swallows a
sleeping pill he recalls her recent poisoning herself).
The narrator is practically identified with the hero. This
feature imparts a sense of intimate sincerity to the story. It also
permits the reader to see the situation ‘from within’, through the
hero’s eyes and feel empathy with him. The stream of Montag’s
consciousness is naturally blended with attendant facts and
snatches of dialogue.
The whole scene is set in the bedroom, where the wistful
Montag lies beside his apathetic abstracted wife, Mildred, who
listens to the radio transistor tamped in her ear. The hero is
troubled by vague dissatisfaction with his life and is eager to
communicate this feeling to his wife. But she is quite
inaccessible, immersed in the music on the radio. Montag
deplores his failure to adjust himself to Mildred’s mode of life.
He regrets, if somewhat mockingly, that he has not bought
himself an audio-Seashell broadcasting system to talk to her late
at night (despite all his loathing for automatic appliances). Note
the string of detached asyndetic predicates — ‘murmur, whisper,
shout, scream, yell’ — that are arranged in gradation of intensity
to show how desperately Montag wants to reach his wife.
But even if he reaches her, another problem arises — what to
say. The hero’s despair and helplessness are reflected in the
rhetorical questions: ‘But what would he whisper, what would he
yell? What could he say?’ The absurd inability to establish
contact with his own wife calls to Montag’s memory mirthless
jokes, for example, the one about a gentleman, drunk, ‘coming
home late at night, unlocking the wrong door entering a wrong
room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going
to work and neither of them the wiser’. Note the grammatical
repetition here: several participial phrases (the first three
asyndetic, the following polysyndetic) are used in one sentence to
reproduce a succession of fatuous events. They are suggestive of
the character’s annoyance and bitterness as he projects this
trifling joke on his own life.
When Montag asks his wife about the time and place of their
first meeting, she makes some effort to recollect it, but fails. Her
phrase ‘Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you
met your husband’s wife’, absurd as it may seem, reveals all too
clearly that she perceives her life as something distant and unreal.
She is alienated from the story of her life, the way she is alienated
from the lives of fictitious characters of the soap operas she is
used to seeing. Or perhaps, she is so confounded by those soap
operas that she can hardly tell reality from fiction.
As Mildred swallows her sleeping pills, another memory
comes to Montag — the memory of her recent poisoning. ‘…He
thought of the visit from the zinc-oxide-faced men with the
cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths and the Electronic-Eyed
Snake winding down into layer upon layer of night and stone and
stagnant spring water…. And he thought of her lying on the bed
with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with
concern but only standing straight, arms folded’. It is noteworthy
that the two synonymous phrases are used here to specify the
same fact. The first, rich in metaphoric images, is the product of
Montag’s imaginative perception. The second is a plain
statement, accentuating the fact that everything in the technicians’
procedures was inhumane, automatic, unconcerned.
Montag’s own attitude to Mildred is ambiguous: on the one
hand he still cares for her, he tries to count how many pills she
has swallowed, he ‘wants to call out to her, how many have you
taken
tonight
?’
63
On the other hand, he is growing insensible to
her: ‘He remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain
he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a
street face, a newspaper image…’ This self-contradiction was
evidently so painful to Montag, that he
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