Fahrenheit 451: Mildred

I've already written a bit about Mildred in my previous posts about Guy but now I've got an entire section devoted to this doll-like, character dead, excuse for a human being. Won't this be an interesting post? Mildred is mainly just a psychological drain on Montag. She does absolutely nothing but sit around all day listening to music on the radio, watching the TV and letting the media shove false information down her throat, and just obsessing over technology. She thinks she's happy but she really just hates life. She's the perfect example (along with her friend Mrs. Phelps) of the average citizen in this novel. She does not have a job and has a dependency on medicine which she makes Guy get. She is the perfect polar opposite of the cheery, lifelike, thoughtful, and somewhat naive Clarisse. She doesn't seem to really like Guy all that much, sleeping in different bed then him, and going so far as to turn him into the authorities when she discovers that he is hoarding books. She serves nothing to Montag except to irritate him and at one point he compares to either a mosquito or a wasp. Really the only purpose that she serves in the novel is to show the decrepit state of the citizens in that day and age and to move the plot along by turning in Montag. Other than that she is completely useless and serves no purpose, which I thing is a good quality. Bradbury masterfully writes this character as an empty shell who lives life just for the purpose of living. She takes no initiative and never does anything important (although at one point she does attempt to overdose on sleeping pills to kill herself.) All in all I think it was a good move for Bradbury to put this character in the novel because she just helps to make the reader realize how terrible the world that exists in the novel really is.