Part One, Reading 2 · The Hearth and the Salamander

Fahrenheit 451

Pathfinders · 7th–9th

Copywork

What did the Eye see? He did not say. He saw but did not see what the Eye saw. The entire operation was not unlike the digging of a trench in one’s yard. The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

Read both passages aloud. One is about a woman, and one is about a machine. Which one sounds more alive?

For the educator Two passages; copy them as shown. The first comes from the night of the machines, while two men pump out Mildred’s stomach; the Eye is the operator’s optical helmet, which lets him look inside the person he is working on. It holds the vocabulary word “stratum”. It opens with a question and a four-word answer that refuses to answer. The third sentence turns on a paradox, “saw but did not see”, and uses “saw” three times. The last two sentences are comparisons that make a person into ground: the work is “not unlike” digging a trench (a double negative: it means it is like it), and the woman is “no more than” a layer of marble. Point out the apostrophe in “one’s”. The second passage opens the firehouse scene and holds “capillary”. Its first sentence pairs two paradoxes, “slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live”, then stacks three describing words before “kennel”. The second sentence puts a long subject before its verb and joins its metals with “and … and”. The third repeats “gently” three times and turns a noun into a verb: the legs are “spidered”. The toaster at breakfast “spidered out” a piece of bread; a student may enjoy finding it. For imitation, have the student read a passage twice, set it aside, rebuild it from memory, and then compare. The talk prompt has no single answer. Many students will say the machine: it hums, trembles and quivers, while the woman is “no more than a hard stratum of marble.” Others will hold out for the woman, since the first passage still asks what the Eye saw in her, and the second says outright that the Hound “lived but did not live.” Let the student find for themselves that the writing turns a person into a thing and a thing into a creature; do not name it first. The two passages share one pattern, “saw but did not see” and “slept but did not sleep”, which the imitation asks the student to use.

Discussion

Narration Tell the reading back in four scenes: the machines at night, breakfast and the play, the walk in the rain, and the firehouse. Then say which scene Bradbury makes you feel most, and how the writing does it.

1. Once the men leave, Montag thinks, “Strangers come and take your blood.” They were only doing their job. What, if anything, did they do wrong?Moral reasoning

2. Outside Clarisse’s house, Montag hears a man say that people get used like tissues and thrown away. Does Montag himself ever treat anyone that way?Theme

3. Mildred tells Montag, “I should think you’d consider me sometimes.” Which of them is lonelier in that house?Character

4. Clarisse’s dandelion game says Montag loves no one. Why does a playground game shake him so badly?Character

5. Montag says the Hound threatened him twice last month. Still, at one in the morning, he goes down alone and touches its muzzle. Why go near it at all?Inference

Make a Connection Clarisse says Montag looks at her when she talks, and the others do not. Think of someone who really listens to you. Is being listened to the same as being understood?

Vocabulary

capillary Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.As thin as a hair. The Hound’s nostrils are lined with tiny, fine hairs that catch a scent.

stratum The woman on the bed was no more than a hard stratum of marble they had reached.A layer, like a layer of rock under the ground. To the men digging with their machine, Mildred is only something in the way.

melancholy And the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths, the men with the eyes of puff-adders, took up their load of machine and tube, their case of liquid melancholy and the slow dark sludge of nameless stuff, and strolled out the door.A deep, heavy sadness that stays. Bradbury calls what the machine took out of Mildred “liquid melancholy”, as if sadness could be pumped out in a tube.

cataract Montag moved back to his own house, left the window wide, checked Mildred, tucked the covers about her carefully, and then lay down with the moonlight on his cheek-bones and on the frowning ridges in his brow, with the moonlight distilled in each eye to form a silver cataract there.A cloudy film over the eye that blurs what a person sees. The moonlight lies in Montag’s open eyes like one.

apprenticeship She was an expert at lip-reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear-thimbles.A long time spent learning a skill or trade by doing it. Mildred has spent ten years in training, wearing her radios, so she reads lips instead of listening.

ballistics It’s like a lesson in ballistics.The study of how bullets and other fired things fly to their target. Beatty uses it to say the Hound is a weapon, not an animal.

Critical thinking

1. At breakfast, Montag lets Mildred think there was a party. That afternoon he tells her she took all the pills. She says she would never do that. He says, “All right if you say so.” Was he right to let it go?

2. Clarisse tells Montag that being a fireman “just doesn’t seem right for you.” Is she seeing him truly, or seeing someone who isn’t there?