then Montag contrasts her face against those of other people's. He realizes that other people's faces may light up for while, but they are eventually "whiffed out," or extinguished. Clarisse, on the other hand, shows his light to himself. He sees that both of them have a light within them that isn't easily extinguished. That light is life, and love, and inquisitiveness. This is significant because this is the event that sparks Montag to question the world in which he lives. This realization sets him on the path to analyzing his life and needing to discover what might be missing from it. He doesn't want to be a person who lives his life without that light and he sets out to discover it.

After meeting Clarisse in the beginning of Fahrenheit 451, Montag goes home and looks at a blank wall. However, the memory of Clarisse is so fresh in his memory that he can picture her perfectly. The following extended simile illustrates this:

She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of the night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun. (8)

This description is profound because it is thorough and accessible; most people can imagine what he's describing and picture it clearly in their mind's eye. The fact that he compares her face to a clock at night and muses about the clarity of moving towards a new sun (or starting a new day) suggests that Clarisse excites a part of Montag that has been dead or unexplored for a long time.

Montag further compares her face to a mirror because he feels that she understands him, and this is a rare feeling: "How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?" (8). He senses that she has an "incredible power of identification," and wonders if his eyelid itched if hers would blink. Their meeting seems meant to be for Montag.

In Fahrenheit 451, Clarisse engages Montag in peculiar, thoughtful, meaningful conversation. Mildred is lost in the world of the shows on her parlor walls. Aside from Beatty, Montag's coworkers are mindless drones. Clarisse challenges Montag's assumptions about the way he lives his life and this causes him to reflect upon his own life. Clarisse is blunt about this, closing their conversation by asking Montag if he is happy. By engaging him in thoughtful conversation, she ("her face") is like a mirror because she gets Montag to reflect upon himself. Montag thinks that others rarely listen to you and give something back. Rather, most others are like torches, just spewing out flames until they fizzle out. Clarisse is more human in this way. Others are more passive, more robotic; and the simile between others and torches symbolizes the fact of this society where any kind of thoughtful, humanistic communication is destroyed by the flames. Just as knowledge (books) are destroyed, so is the way people communicate with each other.