Fahrenheit 451: The Irony of "The Hearth and the Salamander"

A detailed Summary of Fahrenheit 451: The Irony of "The Hearth and the Salamander"


The title 'The Hearth and the Salamander' is purposely ironic. Montag's home life is ironic to the title. Montag and Mildred do not really know each other. Montag and Mildred have trouble communicating.

Webster's Dictionary says that a hearth means "the fireside, family life, or home." Hearth usually implies warmth. When Montag goes into his house for the first time he describes it like "coming into the cold marbled room of a mausoleum." His house should have been happy, not like going into a cold, deserted tomb. Montag's home life definitely took a plunge when his wife tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. When Montag came home he kicked the "small crystal bottle of sleeping tablet which earlier {that day} had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty" on the bedr


Montag and Mildred do not really know each other. "{Montag} remembered thinking than that if {Mildred} died, he certainly wouldn't cry. For it would be the face of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty." Montag and Mildred were not very close. So that there is no time to be idle, the society that Montag and Mildred live in keeps everyone constantly on the go. This seems to keep Montag and Mildred from remaining close. There was "'a wall between {Montag} and Mildred... Literally not just one wall but, so far, three! And expensive, too!'" Mildred gets too absorbed in the Wall-to-Wall circuit television

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Approximate Word count = 550
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

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