What makes Montag an outsider and Mildred a conformist, but unhappy citizen in dystopia?

Characterize them by personal information, behaviour, values and attitudes while answering the question.

Guy Montag is thirty years old and married with Mildred. Both have no children. He says his wife wants none. For ten years he has been fireman, dressed like a fireman at that time, with uniform and a helmet numbered 451, a salamander on his arm and a phoenix-disc on his chest. He always has splashes of a fiery smile on his lips and a pipe in his mouth. He has black hair, black brows; he is shaved but looks unshaved. However, he is a fireman in his time, not a fireman we know, but a man who burns books. Kerosene is like perfume for him. He likes his job and he never asks why he does it, because his father and his grandfather did the same work, too. One gets the impression that Montag leads a normal life and he feels happy.

This changes after he met Clarisse. She causes him to think about his life and his feelings. It is Clarisse who reminds him how nice the world could be, if he saw it correctly. Suddenly he allows himself to admit that he is not really happy.

After his wife’s suicide attempt he is unable to answer himself why she tried to kill herself. He is full of care for Mildred. So he is not sure, if the men, who have come for rescue, are the right men and if they have learned to rescue people in a correct way. Furthermore he is helpless against “the family” of his wife, broadcast from the TV-walls for which he has paid a lot of money. He is not able to speak to Mildred; in that way both are dissatisfied.

Montag falls into a crisis after he has burnt books in a house with an old woman in it. This time he starts losing his self-confidence. He doubts his job; he falls ill and needs the help of his wife. But there is no help. Instead he has conflicts with Mildred and Beatty, his boss. Both cannot understand that this is a problem for him. Reading is forbidden, for them it is clear. Montag has another view of that. Secretly he has hidden books and wants to read them to find out what the problem is with him and his wife. In the course of the text Montag becomes more sympathetic.

Mildred is Guy Montag’s wife. They have no children, and her husband says that she does not want them. Her appearance is not advantageous; her hair is defect by chemical influence. So it looks like straw. Also her body is thin, scrawny nearly; it appears there is not enough to eat for her or she is on a diet. The color of her flesh gives the impression of being white bacon. Her lips are painted with a red lipstick, so she looks even paler. Her eyes do not look into this world, they are not clear; it looks as if there was a kind of cataract in them which is invisible.

It is thinkable that it is all the same to her what she looks like, because she lives in her own world, in a world of daily soaps, in a world of media. Her family is the people on TV. It is a great pleasure for her to be integrated into these series by an announcer. This is the thing she lives for. If there are no films on TV she has her headphones in her ears. She can be very angry if she is disturbed watching TV. She is in accordance  with the system due to the continuous brain-washing from the media. Therefore she is not able to understand Montag, her husband, who is interested in all the things of the real world. When Montag is ill, she does not care for him in the right way. She does not show consideration for him, for example she listens to loud music, when Montag is ill in bed. In this way she neglects her husband. Furthermore she is very forgetful, she forgets to bring her husband the medicine and she does not remember when she met him at first.

She is a very complicated character, she is often sleepless, then she drives very fast in the streets and kills rabbits or dogs, it seems for her it is normal, a very aggressive behavior. On the other hand, she is unhappy with her life. One time she tries to set an end to it by taking too much medicine. Later she cannot remember that and why she did so. When she finds out that Montag is an owner of books she is fearful. That is going so far that she tells it to his boss to save herself.

She is not a really sympathetic figure. Sometimes you can get the impression that she is naïve or perhaps not very intelligent. It appears that she has changed her character after the treatment of the men who save her life.