When using the phrase "lack of emotion," the connotation suggests that a person feels nothing--positive or negative. People in Montag's society have been trained to exist in a distracted state and without emotion. That means they are always doing something that distracts them from any connection to anyone else. For example, if people aren't watching TV, they are listening to the radio or driving their cars at ridiculously fast speeds. As a result, many people in Montag's world are beyond feeling much of anything. Captain Beatty, for instance, is able to slap an old woman without flinching. When they go to an old woman's house to burn it down, Captain Beatty says and does the following:
"'Enough of that!' said Beatty. 'Where are they?' . . . He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question" (36).
Captain Beatty feels nothing for this woman. He sees her as an object standing in the way of him completing his job and burning her books. When she threatens to stay behind and die in her house with her books, Beatty doesn't care. He warns her, but when she starts the fire herself, he isn't even phased. He tells the other firemen that it is all in a day's work and she was a fanatic anyway. Beatty could be considered past feeling in this case.
Mildred is the perfect example of what their society would consider a good citizen. She stays in her house distracted and selfish all day long. When Montag tells her that he is frustrated, and doesn't know what to do, she advises him to do the following:
"Go take the beetle. . . I always like to drive fast when I feel that way. . . It's fun out in the country. You hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs. Go take the beetle" (64).
The above passage demonstrates Mildred's lack of emotion for killing rabbits and dogs. She uses a vehicle to take out her frustrations on innocent animals and doesn't care one bit. Mildred's friends are just like her, too. When Montag asks Mrs. Phelps about her third husband, she says that they are both so independent that when he left for war, they didn't cry or hug--he just left. She also says the following:
"I'm not worried. . . I'll let Pete do all the worrying. . . Not me. I'm not worried" (94).
Mrs. Phelps shows her lack of emotion for her husband as he goes off to war and she won't worry one bit. It is at this point that Montag is past feeling, as follows:
"Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women's faces as he had once looked at the aces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. . . But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women. . . (95).
Montag isn't surprised to hear that Mrs. Phelps shows no real emotion because she's never felt it her whole life. To make matters worse, Mrs. Bowles shows her true colors when she talks about her children as if they were laundry:
"I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. . . You heave them into the 'parlor' and turn on the switch. It's like washing clothes: stuff laundry in and slam the lid" (96).
There's absolutely no motherly love from Mrs. Bowles. It's as if the whole society knows nothing about true emotion because everyone seems to be strangers to it. It's probably a vicious cycle that each generation has grown up without. Real authentic relationships are absent in this society because everyone is taught hedonism from birth.
The closest Faber comes to showing a lack of emotion is after he's explained to Montag how everything became so bad. He says, "Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the 'families.' Our civilization if slinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge" (87). Faber's advice is to stand back, stay out of the fight, and let everyone blow themselves away. He's hoping that a war will take care of everything so he doesn't have to care.
No comments:
Post a Comment