Fahrenheit 451 Part I: The Hearth and the Salamander (Vocabulary for clarification as needed) cacophony: simultaneous loud, jarring sounds cataract: milky film that covers the lens of the eye centrifuge: machine that spins rapidly to separate liquids of different densities dictum: a command dike: manmade embankment used to hold back water feigning: pretending figments of imagination: made up or imaginary things fragile: easily broken or hurt gorging: gluttonous, greedy haltingly: hesitantly heresy: act against God or against the power structure incinerator: type of furnace used to burn waste or garbage jargon: specialized language luminescent: glowing, shining luxuriously: sumptuously, grandly mausoleum: tomb or crypt where bodies or ashes are kept melancholy: profound sadness minstrel man: white performer who used black makeup and other props to transform himself into an exaggerated stereotype of an African-American optical: related to the eye pantomime: act out an action without speaking pedestal: a stand or platform phoenix: mythical bird that burns itself up and is born again in repeated cycles pratfall: deliberate mistake or exaggerated fall done for comic effect pulverized: crushed or ground to a powder queer: unusual, strange, peculiar ravenous: terribly hungry salamander: small, lizard-like amphibian; in mythology, a lizard that lives in fire singed: lightly burnt or burnt at the edges stolid: emotionless, distant stratum: section, layer Theremin: musical instrument that receives vibrations and is played without touching it venomous: poisonous (Use the following questions as you read and/or to review and analyze what you have read. The page numbers listed are aligned to/with the 60th anniversary edition.) 1. Describe the opening scene of the novel. How does it set the tone? 2. Identify one metaphor on pg. 1. 3. Identify and describe Guy Montag (personality and physically; characterization) and describe his job. Novel’s protagonist, black hair, black brows…fiery face, and…blue-steel shaved but unshaved look. He is a third generation fireman that burns books. 4. Why is Montag’s helmet numbered “451”? What do the salamander and the phoenix on his uniform represent? (Symbolism) Montag’s helmet has number 451 because it’s the temperature in which the paper burns. The salamander represents fire, is the foundation of this dystopian world and that firemen represent power, protection, and immortality and the phoenix: rebirth, It shows that once something is created, it has to fall. 5. For the preceding/previous few days, Montag says he’s had “uncertain feelings” about the sidewalk around the corner from his house. What does Montag finally discover there? Montag finds Clarisse McClellan, a delicate and gentle girl which is 16 years old. 6. Describe Clarisse McClellan. Use direct and/or indirect characterization (S.T.E.A.L.). Include two similes used to describe her. A 17 year old girl that is an outcast from society, doesn’t like socializing, has awkward habits. “She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of the night” “How like a mirror ,too, her face” 7. What sound device is used when Montag tells Clarisse, “Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner,...” (pg. 6) Alliteration 8. Why do they have 200 foot-long billboards on the side of the highway? To what is Clarisse referring when she talks about green, pink, white, and brown blurs? (pgs. 6-7) 9. To what does Clarisse compare sitting around with her family and talking? Why does that act make her family “peculiar”? (pg. 7) 10. What do those details (from questions 8-9) show about their/Guy’s society? 11. Describe Montag’s bedroom. (Mood) How does this connect to him, what he is feeling, and his society? (pgs. 9-10) The bedroom is dark, cold, without air, gloomy. 12. What does Montag discover about his wife when he returns home? (pgs. 10-14) 13. Whom does the hospital send instead of a doctor to treat Mildred? Why? What do they do? (pgs. 10-14) They send technicians 14. What does Mildred do in the parlor? How do her relationships with the characters compare to her relationship with Montag? (pgs. 15 – 18, pgs. 40-44) 15. What is happening inside Montag when he feels “his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other”? (pg. 21) 16. What is the Mechanical Hound? What is it used for? (pgs. 21-24) 17. What does Montag think of when the Hound growls at him? Does Montag have a guilty conscience, as Beatty suggests? How could this serve as foreshadowing? (pgs. 24-25) 18. Compare Clarisse’s definition of “social” to the society’s definition? (pgs. 26-28) 19. How do children behave toward one another in Clarisse’s society? How does she feel about her peers? (pgs. 27-28) 20. What do those details (from questions 14 and 15) show about Bradbury’s society (the author; historical context) and how do they compare to our society now? 21. What simile was used to describe the falling books in the old woman’s house? What mood does it produce? (pg. 34) 22. How could the old lady’s act of lighting the fire compare to Brutus’s suicide in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar? (pgs. 36-37) 23. What does Mildred answer when Montag asks her about Clarisse’s whereabouts? (pgs. 44-45) 24. What is Mildred’s response when Montag tells her that they burnt an old woman with her books? What does this show about Mildred? (Characterization) (pg. 47) 25. Describe Mildred. Use direct and/or indirect characterization (S.T.E.A.L.). 26. Carefully study the events leading up to the time that Beatty says “intellectual” became “the swear word it deserved to be.” (pgs. 51-60) 27. To what is a book compared (metaphor) to show its “danger?” (pg. 56) 28. In order to weed out the “odd ducks” like Clarisse and her family, what has the government done? How does it show dystopian characteristics? (pg. 57) 29. What does Beatty say every fireman gets an itch to do once in his career? What is he indirectly telling Guy? (pg. 59)
