Significance Of The Hound In Fahrenheit 451

The sound of electricity crackles faintly, striking fear in anyone within earshot. The faint sniffing under the front door can be heard, and the terrifying eight-legged death machine on the front steps prepares himself for yet another kill. The Mechanical Hound, a character in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, thinks only what she is told to think. This creature’s thoughts are one of a kind; the lack of original thoughts made by the Hound speaks plenty about the society he was created in, compared to the fact that the machine functions solely to slaughter people. The many mechanical pieces, police alert, frayed wires, and DNA sequences displayed in the apparatus of the mechanism represent the inner workings of the mind of one of the dogs. The DNA sequence placed below the ‘nose’ of the Hound represents all of the creatures killed for the sport of killing. The firemen on-duty with no job to attend to would program the DNA sequences of animals into the Hound and bet on whether one creature or another would be captured by the Hound first. The Hound comes out of its kennel for these competitions often, functioning only for the sake of gambling. He thinks and breathes death, whether it is for the entertainment of

The Hound was created to kill outlaws in a clean, flawless way, creating little cleanup and even a little enjoyment in seeing the beautiful acrobatics of the slaughter. Montag’s escape from the Hounds he encounters, followed by the death of an innocent man, portrays the corrupt society the Hound has been raised in. The thoughts of the mechanism during the chase changes midway, in order to please the public. The Hound does her job however she is told to do it, even if it is for the entertainment of the people watching the high-speed chase of a renegade. Whatever the people are interested in is what is delivered, morphing this pristine killing machine into simply an entertainment