Monday, October 30, 2017

Back into the cave! Characterize and explain Montag’s reaction to the televisions shows that Mildred and her friends are watching in the...

Montag is disgusted by the violent shows that Mildred and her friends are watching. He describes what the women are watching on TV:


"Three White Cartoons chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air" (page 94 in the Del Ray edition, 1991).



Montag feels disgusted by the women's hysterical reactions to the shows and their delight in the constant displays of violence. The women react loudly and without thought. Earlier in the chapter, Montag describes them as "a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes" (page 93). This description implies that the women are as hard as crystals and make noise without meaning.


Montag has already started to read books at this point in the book, and he feels increasingly distanced from his wife and her friends, who spend their days watching TV and delighting in wanton violence. Later in this chapter, he "stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child" (page 95). In other words, the women are as strange and foreign to him as religion, as he has never practiced religion. His distance from his wife and most of society will only continue to grow as the novel goes on.

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