I am not sure that I am necessarily understanding your
question. It appears that the parlour walls, covered in the three screens that almost
completely surround Mildred and her friends with visions of her "family" do nothing to
promote community effort and do everything to keep people isolated and separated from
each other and also themselves. It seems that this dystopian society is characterised by
a tremendous emptiness that the force of the media can only barely cover. Note how
Montag looks at his wife and her friends as they sit together watching the
screens:
readability="16">Montag said nothing but stood looking at the
women's faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had
entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him,
though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that
religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense
and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and
concerned by the meaning of the colourful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the
blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store,
and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched
the wood and plaster and
clay.The overwhelming image
is one of profound emptiness as Montag looks at his wife and her friends and sees
hollow, empty shells. Thus the parlour walls seem to do nothing to promote community
effort; instead they only serve to try to distract people from the empty, hollow feeling
inside of them that has been produced thanks to the eradication of literature and the
general dumbing down of society.
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