In Fahrenheit 451, what are parlor walls and what is displayed on them?

In Bradbury's celebrated novel Fahrenheit 451, the parlor walls are massive television screens that take up entire living rooms and entertain shallow people like Mildred and her friends. These parlor walls produce bright, vivid images and are extremely loud and distracting. Montag has three parlor walls in his home, and Mildred insists that they purchase another to complete their viewing parlor. Mildred spends the vast majority of her leisure time glued to the parlor screens, consuming mindless entertainment. Mildred's favorite program on the parlor walls is a show she refers to as "the family," which lacks a plot and is simply a bunch of characters chatting to each other about nothing.

Similar to other programs on the parlor walls, "the family" is senseless entertainment meant to amuse unintelligent, superficial people like Mildred. Mildred is so addicted to watching television and consumed by the programs that she views the characters as her actual family. The parlor walls are also interactive, and Mildred is mailed parts of the script, which she reads aloud at different moments in the show.

The other shows Mildred watches are chaotic compilations of clips involving explosions, flying rockets, and violent altercations. In part 2, Montag interrupts Mildred and her friends while they are watching the parlor walls. In this scene, Bradbury depicts the sort of senseless entertainment on the television screens by writing,

Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds, it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and yellow fish. A minute later, Three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other's limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again.

The confusing, meaningless entertainment reflects the superficial culture of Bradbury's dystopia. Montag despises the parlor walls, and Mildred's addiction to television negatively affects her marriage.

How were the parlor walls described when they burned in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451?

In writer Ray Bradbury's science fiction story "Fahrenheit 451," the parlor walls are described as hissing out at Montag when they burned. These parlor walls housed the large TV screens that his wife watched continuously as she lived her life through the TV shows she watched - interacting with the actors in the stories that took place on screen. In essence, she lived in another world, separate from the realty of the home life she actually shared with her husband, Montag, the protagonist of this futuristic novel. However, there really wasn't a "home life" between the two - she had grown so far apart from him because of her immersion in another "reality". - or at least what she perceived as reality.

Montag is happy to burn down these TV screens on the parlor walls as they were an intrusion on his domestic life with the wife he once loved, but who is now like a stranger to him. The novel relates that:

"The fire-proof plastic sheath on everything was cut wide and the house began to shudder with flame."

This is what the description is of the burning of the room and the parlor walls - after the original "hissing" - when Montag gives the room a final blast of flame to destroy the room, and, essentially the rest of the house.

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