i remember talking about the mirror motifs in the novel, f451 and isn't there a part at the end of the novel where the city is destroyed and montag wants to build a mirror factory.. i wont be able to get a copy anytime soon to check so i thought that one of you really nice ppl would help me find out the answer. thx. i really appresheiate it <spellcheck!>

Interestingly, there are two mirror references at the end. I had not remembered them. Kudos to you! With my feeble memory, I could never be one of the "books" at the end of the novel, it looks like you could.

The first is Montag's use of the image. The city is blown up in an instant, and Montag is thinking of his wife in her last moments:

"Montag, falling flat, going down, saw or felt, or imagined he saw or felt the walls go dark in Millie's face, heard her screaming, because in the millionth part of time left, she saw her own face reflected there, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it was such a wildly empty face, all by itself in the room, touching nothing, starved and eating of itself, that at last she recognized it as her own and looked quickly up at the ceiling as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal, plaster, and wood, to meet other people in the hives below. . ."

The mirror, in this case, reflects her own emptiness as a person. So the mirror is not a positive image here. It's interesting that the description above cites Millie as "touching nothing", because Granger, a few pages earlier, has defined man's contribution and meaning as what he touches with his hands. We influence the world by the changes we make to it and those changes are represented by our hands as agents of change. The fact that Montag sees her as "touching nothing" seems very significant to me in making a statement that she added no value. Montag was feeling bad because he did not miss her or mourn that she would be lost in the wars. Granger's reply was:

"When I was a boy, my grandfather died, and he was a sculpter . . . he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did . . . Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made . . . something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . ."

Because this occurs a few pages before Montag's vision of his wife seeing nothing in the mirror, and touching nothing; the mirror is a vehicle to show the vacuous nature of Millie's existence. She has not touched anything, and so there is really no significant loss. This is why Montag feels nothing. Granger's description of his grandfather is that he was an individual because of the unique things he did. Millie has done nothing unique, and is not really an individual, and so her loss is less significant emotionally.

The other reference to a mirror -- the mirror factory you are remembering -- is by Granger, not Montag. It comes after a little mini-lecture by Granger where he discusses the Phoenix as a bird that is destroyed by fire (a funeral pyre), then rises again. He says that man is like the Phoenix with the added advantage that man can remember and see the mistakes in the past and learn from them. He says,

". . .but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them"

It is after this that Granger says,

" Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them."

In this case, the mirrors will allow us to look honestly at our past as a race/species, and learn from it in order to help us prevent repeating it. Like the oft-quoted, "Those that don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" (or something similar.)

So, in this case, altough we see the bad, we learn from it and it becomes a basis for saving ourselves. It seems like the people who all remember the books are also saving something for us to learn from when the time is right and the people are ready.

Anyway, this is probably more than you were bargaining for, but I thought it was an interesting question -- made more interesting by the context of both mirror references.

Hope this helps!

P.S. We really are nice ppl!