Mildred’s suicide attempt and her subsequent isolation from reality help Montag change.
Montag is a fireman. His job is to find and burn books. For most of his life, he has never questioned anything. After his conversation with Clarisse, who asks him if he is happy, Montag begins to look at the world a little differently. He begins to be more disturbed by his wife Mildred’s actions.
Mildred lives a life of nothingness. She...
Mildred’s suicide attempt and her subsequent isolation from reality help Montag change.
Montag is a fireman. His job is to find and burn books. For most of his life, he has never questioned anything. After his conversation with Clarisse, who asks him if he is happy, Montag begins to look at the world a little differently. He begins to be more disturbed by his wife Mildred’s actions.
Mildred lives a life of nothingness. She makes herself comatose with pills, and listens to a seashell radio at night instead of being with her husband. Her isolation and tomblike state starts to really get to Montag. He feels as if he can’t breathe.
The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time. (Part I)
Mildred has no personality. She barely registers when Clarisse dies, and does not bother to tell her husband. She either doesn’t realize that Clarisse is important to him or she simply forgets about it. The only things that matter to her are her television and her radio. She lives a mind-numbingly meaningless existence.
Due to the empty nature of everyone’s lives, suicide is very common in Montag’s society. When he finds Mildred has taken all of her pills to commit suicide, he is horrified by the impersonal nature of the experience.
The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one's yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached. Go on, anyway, shove the bore down, slush up the emptiness, if such a thing could be brought out in the throb of the suction snake. (Part I)
Mildred helps Montag realize that he really does need to change, and that his society needs to change. When he steals a book, she seems to care little about it. Books are not real, like the family. Montag knows better. He feels lost, and the books give him a sense of purpose. Mildred certainly doesn’t.
Mildred turns Montag in for having books, causing her own home to be burned and her husband to be arrested. He feels betrayed, of course, but not surprised. Montag kills Faber, his boss, and goes on the run. Mildred has again reminded him of why he does not want to be a part of this world.
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