The Hearth and the Salamander lays out the pro Essays (359 words)

" The Hearth and the Salamander " lays out the problem: Montag's world expunges the life of the mind and oppresses those who pursue intellectual activities or items. Critical examinations of the novel have located its dystopian character in this vulgar, repressive society, and some have commented on how it extrapolates social and political trends of the late 1940s and early 1950s, or how the science fiction genre responds to perceived threats to its own interest group. 2 Certainly the extrapolation of technological trends and the cultural tenor of the early 1950s is fairly clear. We can see almost immediately how the text articulates contemporary crises: about styles of academic thought and the politics of academic expression; about accepted views about the intellect's role in governing and using affect and the propriety of allowing individuals to exercise control over this by self-administered chemicals; and about the extent to which appropriating canonical texts (in the manner of pre-modern thought) hindered or helped the drive towards existential authenticity. What has not been explored, as far as I am aware, is the way that Bradbury characterises the repression of thought, of reading, and of oratory, as a repression of memory. Several episodes in " The Hearth and the Salamander " use the lexis or imagery of pre-modern memory texts to show how those "higher-order thinking skills" which the society seems most zealous to efface are those which draw most on memory. In order, these are Mildred's overdose; Clarisse's description of the school day; the altered history in The Firemen of America ; the burning of the old woman; the failure of Millie and Guy's autobiographical memory by forgetting how they met; and Captain Beatty's long apologia for the state of his world. Even a nodding acquaintance with pre-modern memory and intellectual culture, described in studies like those of Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers , will probably reveal other episodes. To examine all of these episodes is beyond the scope of this essay; I will explore Millie's overdose, Clarisse's description of schooling, and the burning of the old woman as evidence of the first part of the novel's argument about memory .