Life and Death
Some people live without making any contributions to their society. Although they are alive, there are effectively dead. Others contribute to society, and even after they die, they live in people’s hearts forever. The basic biological distinction between death and life is whether the person is breathing and thinking. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, there is a deeper distinction between being dead or alive: whether the person is changing anything in the world. In the F451 society, Mildred is dead because of her emptiness, Granger’s grandfather is alive because of his great contributions to the world, and books are living entities because they change people’s mind.
The protagonist’s wife Mildred is spiritually and emotionally dead. One night after work, Montag comes back home and sees Mildred stretched out on the bed. “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall; but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow. There was only the singing of the thimble-wasps in her tamped-shut ears, and her eyes all glass, and breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out of her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, went or came”(13). Montag stands in the front of Mildred, but she is oblivious to his presence. The “seashells” in her ears make her even emptier. The loud music bombards her senses, and she cannot hear Montag call her name. Mildred is numb. Her eyes are glassy. When Montag looks into her eyes, he sees only darkness, the emptiness of her mind. Mildred’s “breath going in and out, softly, faintly, in and out of her nostrils, and her not caring whether it came or went, went or came”(13). Mildred seems like a robot, a machine. When Montag kicks the sleeping pill bottle under her bed, he knows there is something wrong with his wife. He calls the emergency hospital. Two machines take lots of thing out of Mildred and make her even emptier. The next morning when...