Ray Bradbury: Technology's Takeover

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Technology’s Takeover In the question, there are two sides. Bradbury starts the characters and Montags journey on a pro technology side. One character that is pro technology is ironically Guy Montag's wife, Mildred Montag. Mildred loves the technology and insists on having Guy buy her TVs that mount to cover whole walls and give her a ‘family’, replacing the idea of getting an actual family. This TV parlour replaces the family room where instead of having a family, one has TV’s. Instead of inviting kids, a natural future, Mildred invites technology to become a part of her life. When Mildred is exclaiming the need for these TV’s, she says, “ it’d be just like this room wasn't our at all”. By implanting this ideology Bradbury starts to show…show more content…
But Mildred intends to get rid of that by covering all four walls, and cover all hope for a family. Bradbury writes, “get the fourth wall torn and a fourth wall-TV put in”(18). By removing the walls’ sense of natural stability, she wants technology to takeover. Bradbury uses this fictional character, Mildred, to show how technology takes over. He does this by giving Mildred no hope of solving the problems within her life. She is extremely reckless with her pills. When Montag confronts her and exclaims “[y]ou took all the pills in your bottle last night”(17), she seems unfazed. Montag uses possessive pronouns like you and your meaning he is trying to confront and blame her. Montag notices that her overdose shows that she is deeply dissatisfied with her life, yet instead of trying to face it, she tries to end it. She is one of the characters the Bradbury tries to relate us all to. Mildred uses technology as a portal to escape reality, something this generation, along with others do often. From playing a new character in a videogame, or following a character's troubles on a tv show, modern era people use technology as a gateway away from reality. Mildred uses the tv to escape her own reality. She continues to do this and…show more content…
In this quote Bradbury really tries to personify nature into a more technological feature, giving it not only more humanistic quality but modernizing them to fit a radio in this futuristic era. By describing an electronic ocean of sound, Ray Bradbury uses the ocean as a leitmotif and defines the ocean as a ruthless, unstable, and uncontrollable power, controlled to a regulated rhythm. Readers then proceed to read Bradbury's entrance of silent command into the scene. These enter into her unsleeping mind while Mildred is unconscious. This translates into her subconscious altering her true thoughts and altering her opinions and state of mind. This idea further represents itself with music. Music symbolizes a way to express and release emotions. By controlling both Mildreds logical and emotional state of mind, readers observe technology's silent takeover upon the natural world. Bradbury refers to this device in the novel as a seashell. By labeling this device as a seashell, Bradbury uses irony to juxtapose the societies ideals. The seashell should be a natural object, yet this society relates it to technology

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