The Hearth and the Salamander (way past due)

      The instantaneous punch to the gut Bradburry's novel Fahrenheit  451 delivers is skilled and accurate. The first section was a suspenseful unveiling of a series of most inconceivable events. The Hearth and the Salamander provided me with the momentum I needed to get into the story, making a clear, crisp message for me to relate to and understand.
     Aside from the disturbing pleasure Montag receives from igniting a home in the middle of the night, one of the first things I instantly noticed was Bradburry's depiction of Clarisse. Montag describes her as a haunting, unfamiliar being in a white dress. I personally feel that white in this context represents the ashes and ruins of American society (symbolically, of course). But also a faint air of hopefulness is emanated from the doe-eyed girl's character. She is full of wonder and mystique, and an ancient appreciation of the world well beyond her years. She is very young, but much wiser than Montag, and that bothers him.
   Mildred is such an unfortunate character. I can't stand her but I know I can't blame her for her faults. She has no substance, no depth, no characteristics that make me care anything about her. She and Montag sleep in separate beds which I found very strange. Humans in this world have almost completely lost the need for warm, personal interaction. Of course one of the main points in the book is that so many technological advancements have been made that humans have inadvertently brainwashed themselves and only live to seek out momentary pleasures, so this separation of beds makes sense. Man and wife probably only sleep in the same bed together to have sex, and because the sensations of passion and love have been sucked dry from the human soul, these marital relations are only for pleasure as well. This is very sad to me because part of being married to someone is to have that connection and love with them, and when love and compassion are gone from the world there is nothing else. As you can tell, I was really bothered.
   The citizens in this book are always searching for a way to feel something, so violence and corrupt law enforcement has become an issue. The "Hound"? Sickening. The idea of someone creating a mechanism designed to hunt and inject a needle of toxins into a living being is perverted. What makes it more perverse is that in this book the firemen sick the metal mutt on a creature and watch it hunt the animal like it's a game.  People are killing each other and the police don't even have to ignore it because they don't even care. Mildred thinks actors on a television screen (or all three?) are her family. It's repulsive, really. I'm all for technology because I think iPods are fun and great, but I do not want to become this because it just sounds miserable. But that's just it, isn't it? If we were living in this society, we wouldn't feel deprived of anything because we would have everything we'd ever known readily available to us - and that is the scary part.