Clarisse is a fourteen-year-old girl
Clarisse is a fourteen-year-old girl. However, to Montag she seems older and wiser, more than his wife. To Montag, Mildred seems more childish in comparison to Clarisse. This probably due to Mildred’s lack of knowledge of the world. Mildred only knows as far as what is said on the radio and television. In this society, the technology used has replaced human interaction. Mildred often refers to the people on her television screen as apart of her family. Montag and Mildred do not share the same bed and she is constantly pushing Montag to go to work. This is possibly due to her not wanting human interaction, so she could watch television.
When Montag come home from his work, Mildred is always lying in bed listening to the radio like a lifeless zombie and not acknowledging her surroundings. She is described as lost soul that is empty inside. This is because Mildred is there alive physically in a room. However, her thoughts and feelings are elsewhere. Throughout the book, Bradbury uses Paradoxical phrases to define characters as a dead and alive or something that is there and not there. This represents Mildred’s zombie like state in the novel. The author also uses similar paradoxical phrases to describe the snake and the mechanical hound.
Even though Montag’s world does not care too much for nature, their culture references objects to animals. For an example, The snake and the mechanical hound. The only natural earth element that people still adore is fire. Fire has lost its necessity for sustaining human life into what people take for granted. They often use fire to fuel their entertainment.
The presence of precognition that Montag feels when he meets Clarisse and being tentative towards seeing Mildred’s empty bottles reoccur throughout the novel. Bradbury uses a lot of foreshadowing to predict the event before it happens. This can be shown when Montag is uncertain about the ventilation fan in his house as if something ominous was hidden within it. Bradbury’s poetic writing style is revealed to the reader when Montag explains the pleasure he gets from burning books and the detailed excursions of when Montag assumes that someone is waiting for him around a street corner.
