The Mechanical Hound can often be described as a modern characterization of the Erinyes or the Furies from Greek mythology. The Furies were often known as deities of vengeance, which sounds awfully familiar when compared to the role that the Mechanical Hound played in Fahrenheit 451’s society. The Furies like the Mechanical Hound would punish crimes by pursuing culprits relentlessly. Playing off of this idea, Ray Bradbury shows how society quickly silences the voices of the few and through the mechanical parts of the hound that society is made up of many different people, but he does offer a sense of hope (that can also be seen as false sense of hope) by saying that the hound “sleeps” and that it does not act on it’s own.
Although the Hound can be compared to the Furies, Bradbury is able to turn the Greek myth into something more sinister and complicated. Leaving the Hound as an overlooked theme and metaphor. The Furies initial task was to hear the complaints of mortals and then dish …show more content…
Montag describes how the Hound works, “All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the House are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s memory” (30). As with society, nothing comes about without some sort of human influence. This is how Bradbury gives the reader hope, by allowing the reader to assume or believe that the Hound was once man controlled. This when translated into everyday society may mean that before society is too heavily influenced it is completely possible to stop it in it’s tracks from getting dominated by one set opinion. If the Hound had not been as influenced as it was by the firemen and government it worked for than it can be theorized that the Hound’s goal wouldn’t have been to hunt down the intellectuals of the 451