There are several places where the setting is described,
primarily the scenes in Montag's neighborhood and his house. Right at the beginning of
the book is a description of Montag's walk through his neighborhood after work. I am
using a digital version of the text, so I don't have an exact page number, but it only a
few paragraphs into the story:
He walked out of the fire station and
along the midnight street toward the subway where
the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down its
lubricated flue in the earth and let him out with a great puff of warm air
into the cream-tiled escalator rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he let the escalator waft him into the still night air…Each
time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused, buckling
sidewalk, with perhaps, on one night, something vanishing swiftly across
a lawn before he could focus his eyes or speak…The trees overhead made a
great sound of letting down their dry
rain.
Each of
the highlighted sections demonstrates the vivid imagery for which Ray Bradbury is known.
The world in which Montag lives is a sterile, lonely place. The images of the silent
subway and the empty streets underscore Montag's isolation. The fact that the sidewalk
is "unused" shows that Montag is an unusual individual, and foreshadows his meeting with
Clarisse.
No comments:
Post a Comment