You could feel the war getting ready in the sky that night. The way the clouds moved aside and came back, and the way the stars looked, a million of them swimming between the clouds, like the enemy disks, and the feeling that the sky might fall upon the city and turn it to chalk dust, and the moon go up in red fire; that was how the night felt.
Short and effective this paragraph captures the mood in the story. How your supposed to be feeling and a concious connection to Montag and how he feels. It shows you his mood and how stress minded he is. It is kind of an extended metaphor but just not as long. He feels as if its just him against the world. As there are few people who really want books in this "new" world. He referecnes the moon going up in fire because thats what he feels like. He's just burning everything down with an unreasonable excuse. The feeling that the enemy ships or disks would just attack or drop bombs and turn everything to dusk. That really puts it into perpective and what he's matched up against. This is the part where he doesn't put in a lot of descriptive language but the concept and overall metaphor is what gets his readers.
I was actually going to write about this one before I saw you already did. It thought it was really interesting how he used stars as enemies. Usually they're thought of as more comforting than that.
ReplyDeleteIf you have seen that many stars in the sky it does seem kind of aggressive, and make the sky seem heavier, like it will fall.