Technology In Fahrenheit 451

The idea of books provoking the reader’s thought, and technology living alongside human beings in a harmonious fashion was certainly alien to Guy Montag, the main character and protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Fahrenheit 451. In his novel, Bradbury depicted a dystopian society where books were burned and their owners were persecuted for merely thinking.With the help of the Mechanical Hound, a robot canine used to track and obliterate, book-owners and those who thought outside the box, technology was a loaded gun pointed between the eyes of society. Members of their society, like Mildred Montag, were shining example of the mindless absorption of useless information through technology. The idea of this society was to keep the peace,

But given this, it can easily be said that Mildred Montag (the spouse of Guy Montag) was a representation of their society in the form of only one person. She was careless and thoughtless, she hungered for entertainment and violence, but most importantly, she had an inhuman obsession with technology. Mildred was so immersed in the material things of life that she failed to see what was actually real. Upon first reading the novel, one might wonder what was wrong with Mildred. In the very beginning of the book, her husband had found her in her bed, accompanied by an empty pill bottle at his foot. What was the reasoning for her downing an entire bottle of pills? The reader’s mind quickly jumps to assume that she is suicidal, perhaps she is so upset with the current standards of society that she chooses to take her own life! But soon it is understood that Mildred was merely too distracted by the parlour walls, and by her seashell ear pieces, to realize that she had taken the whole bottle instead of a single pill. Mildred was a woman who was shrouded in ignorance, and through her ignorance she had only fixated on her programs (whether they were on the parlour walls, or in the buzzing seashells in her ears). She was so captivated by what was going on, that she began to adapt to her life as an addict, and this is relevant to the quote at the beginning of the book where Guy Montag was making an attempt to confront her about the “pill situation”. He was aware of the fact that Mildred had her earpieces in, and he tried to speak with her, but she could not hear him. The narrator went on to say that “ [Mildred] was an expert at lip reading, from ten years of apprenticeship at seashell ear thimble.”(Bradbury, 18) By this, Bradbury gave a clear image of just how bad Mildred had gotten. The seashell ear thimbles