Farenheit 451 #8

Please type it into one of your entries and comment on what you think about the passage.

“Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way? I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly. If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad too?” (Page 9)

This passage is my favorite from the entire book, and plus, Clarisse McClellan, the young seventeen-year-old girl who’s talking right now in this passage, is my favorite character in this book as well. She is very unique and optimistic, and she is definitely different from her classmates in her school. Actually, she is different from the adults in the society, too. Compared to Mildred, who has no hope, no reason to live, and watch TV all day long, Clarisse is very mature and thoughtful. The people and the setting in this book is very dull and dark, however, Clarisse’s bright, funny, wild acts and words made me want to keep reading. She is always full of questions and she’s very emotional - I liked her very much. The passage basically talks about how adults look like from Clarisse’s eyes. She thinks they are too busy and hurrying, and she says it’s very funny and sad as well. It is actually sad because those drivers do not even know what flowers and grass are. They are so beautiful to see and look at, but how could the people not even know what they are? Clarisse might have been a little exaggerating, but she was mainly trying to say how adults are only focused on what they want to do and what’s easy for them. They would never get to think or wonder why roses are pink and grass is green, or why the sun shines everyday because they don’t know about anything and they would not want to know anyway. Her words about the fast drivers pin-pointed the problem of the society directly, and Montag just replied by saying that she is thinking “too much.”