Summary Of Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

Q: How does Bradbury make Clarisse and Mildred memorable characters?

In the novel Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, Bradbury makes Clarisse and Mildred memorable characters by making Clarisse a unique, happy character, making Mildred easily dislikable, and by making them extremely opposite. Clarisse McClellan lives life to the fullest. She enjoys the little things in life and questions why things are done. She sounds like a great person to us, but to the society in F451, she’s mentally ill and must be killed. This clearly illustrates how different, or better said, unique, she is to everyone else in that society. Clarisse also asks many questions, which shows that she is rather innocent. One of the questions she asks Montag is “Are you happy?”

She’s a memorable character, but only because she’s so easy to dislike. Mildred is essentially ignorant, materialistic, empty, and suicidal. Worst of all, she portrays a typical person of the book’s society, so everybody is like her. You can see an example of this when her friends come over. Her friends see their own children as a burden and they don’t care much for their husbands who are at war, just like Mildred doesn’t care about Guy. Like everyone else everybody else, Mildred also doesn’t care at all for human lives. All she cares about is her ‘family’ in the parlor walls. “Now, my ‘family’ is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!” She’s basically brainwashed by the parlor walls. Plus, she kept whining about getting a 4th parlor wall, which is why she wants Montag to go to work. This also demonstrates that she’s selfish and materialistic, she’s only interested in the things she wants, and she mostly cares about having objects. As I’ve mentioned before, she prefers her ‘family’ over her own husband. When Montag was sick, he ordered Mildred to turn down the volume on the parlor walls and to bring him some aspirin. Mildred agrees, but she doesn’t do any of the two things. She even worried about the carpet instead of Montag when he was vomiting. As the cherry on top, she betrays Montag by calling the firemen to come burn the house down. So as you can see, Mildred is the worst character ever (in the book at least) and

They both represent opposite things, Clarisse represents values approved by today’s society; she’s social, cheerful, and cares about others. On the other hand, Mildred is at the other end of the spectrum. She represents the values approved by the story’s dystopian society; she’s selfish, suicidal, and she never has any real conversations with anyone. Bradbury uses these very distinct characters to further illustrate how corrupted the story’s society is, considering the average person in the story behaves much like Mildred. He also uses them to compare their lifestyles; Clarisse likes to think on her own and she’s happy. Mildred lets the government and her ‘family’ think for her and she’s empty and suicidal. Unfortunately, a person like Clarisse couldn’t survive in a society filled with people like Mildred, hence her tragic