Generally, I found that the tone of this book was a little bit dark when I think of the entire book as a whole. It could just be that the events and situations were so depressing that it made the rest of the book seem sad, I'm not sure. I would like to prove myself wrong, so I am going to try and do that not. I am just going to write my entire thought process of deciding below.
So after a lot of pondering and reading random passages, I have come to the conclusion that my original thought was correct, this book is rather dark. The whole book is rather tense, like there might be something you're missing and it sort of makes your brain hurt. “The perspiration gathered with the silence and the subaudible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode (Bradbury 95-96).” That sentence is just an example of how tense the whole book is, its building suspense for something that will happen soon after. Only a few paragraphs later: “The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting (Bradbury 99).” The references to heat build this inescapable feeling of constriction in the reader.
When describing Montag or Mildred, the tone becomes increasingly more sad instead of dark. “He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out (Bradbury 12).” There is just something about that that brings me down. It numbs you, you can relate for a moment. “Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall, but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.” This sentence also makes me feel quite numb, like I should not care about my surroundings. The whole book is thought-provoking in this way, which makes the tone seem sad and dark.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1954
No comments:
Post a Comment