Mechanical (Destany)

My opinion on the Mechanical Hound is that he was a monster created and controlled by our government.  They used what was once known as man’s best friend to resemble a firehouse dog.  This was an eight legged hound or dog used to make the movie Fahrenheit 451.  (Did you know that that Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature that paper must reach to catch fire?)  This dog was not used as any normal firehouse dog, which would normally find and save people from fires.             However he was used to track down humans and kill them in most cases.  If you were found with books you could have been killed.  This dog would track you down and drug you and catch any books you were caught storing on fire.  I believe that the Mechanical Hound was definitely a symbol for the government being in control of what people read.  The mechanical hound taught the fireman how to suggest that books may actually be useful and that you may actually learn from what books had to say rather than burning the books as the hound was sent out to do.  I do find Ironic qualities in the hound for the fact that he did just the opposite of what any normal firehouse dog would do.  Instead of setting out to rescue people from already burning fires, the hound did just the opposite.  He would set the fires to kill and drug the humans.  He set out to prevent humans from reading books and actually learning.

              When Montag began to read the books himself he to realized that the Mechanical Hound was sent out to prevent humans from learning.  Once he began to hide books and understand what he was reading the Hound set out to get and inject him.  The Ironic quality is that the Hound had set off a bomb that sent the fireman into the wild with the rest of the human’s that could read.  Although the city had been burned the humans that could read were able to escape.  So just goes to show that the Ironic factor is that you can learn from reading.