Fire Montag example essay topic

Ray Bradbury originally wrote his novel, Fahrenheit 451, as an indictment against the censorship evident during the McCarthy era of America, and it has since become one of the few modern science fiction books that can be considered a classic. The adulation of this novel is due to its plethora of symbols, metaphors, and character development. Bradbury's character development is singularly impressive in this book because he shows the evolution of the main character, Guy Montag, "from book-burner to living-book" (Johnson 111). His maturity is displayed by his growing understanding of the world in which he lives and by seeing the flaws in his society. Bradbury illustrates Montag's metamorphosis with him changing from a mindless burning drone to his maturation and acceptance into a society of like-minded booklover's. The first words of Bradbury's novel state, "it was a pleasure to burn" (Bradbury 3).

These words sum up the beginning character of Montag; he enjoys burning, and his job is to "answer alarms not to put out fires, but to start them (Moore 103). Guy Montag is a fireman, a man who is trained to spray kerosene on books, and light them in a spectacular show. He has never questioned his job or the reasoning behind burning books. He takes pride in his position, even shines his "beetle-colored helmet" as he hangs it on its hook (Bradbury 4). With fire Montag "bring [s] down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history", and he revels in the power of destruction that fire holds (Bradbury 3). His only view of fire is a product of his job as a fireman; he sees fire as a machine, which simply burns and devours the freedom of the people.

In this period of his life, Montag feels comfortable with machine, especially the machines that produce fire. He sees nothing wrong when his wife lip-reads his words instead of listening to him speak. When Montag first meets his young neighbor, Clarisse, he thinks of her in a mechanical mindset (Johnson 111). He sees them walking, as if "fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry [them] forward" (Bradbury 5). Hence, Montag feels comfortable around the soulless technology of his society; he loves to burn and to destroy, and he cannot think about the morals that surround his job and his culture.

Montag is first pushed towards rejecting his society when he meets Clarisse. She is brave enough to question society and in doing so causes Montag to question the morals of his civilization. Clarisse is the one who "represents those imaginative values that [Montag] lacks and which he must acquire" and she "awakens in him the desire to read" (Touponce 126-8). Montag's first reaction is to laugh off Clarisse's questions; he seems uneasy with the thought of reading. His emotions and laughing reaction reveal his nervousness around a young girl, who can so easily challenge the values that he has followed all his life. Clarisse is also important because she awakens Montag to the natural world.

She asks him if he knew there was a man on the moon, or if he knew what it means when a dandelion rubs off on a chin. Clarisse is the one who introduces Bradbury's theme that " [n] azure is good and technology is bad" (Huntington 113). Clarisse lets Montag experience freedom from his society because " [t] he novel expresses this vision of freedom with images of sentimentalized nature" (Huntington 112). She leaves him feeling that something in Montag's world has changed, that " [h] e was not happy... [h] e wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask" (Bradbury 12). Montag can no longer accept the world the way it is, and thus, either he, or it, must change. He then comes home to his wife, Mildred, to find her near death from a suicide attempt.

Montag watches as two employees use a sinister machine to purge his wife of the poison. Montag sees the machine as "black cobra", and he wonders if "it suck [s] out all the poisons accumulated with the years" (Bradbury 14). Thus, Montag is beginning to view machines as inhuman and unnatural. Mildred is a foil to Clarisse's character; she represents the self-absorbed nature of her world, while Clarisse not only represents, but also is a living example of a natural, creative world.

(Watt 41). Bradbury reinforces this contrast by causing Mildred to relate only to the subject of herself, while Clarisse's favorite subject is other people. When Montag meets the Mechanical Hound, he discovers that it is a "dead beast, [a] living beast" (Bradbury 24). Donald Watt describes it as a "striking and sinister gadget" and it "is most terrifying for being both alive and not alive" (41; Huntington 113). The Hound becomes "Montag's particular mechanical enemy... [and it] becomes more suspicious of him" as time passes and Montag develops a greater freedom from his society (Johnson 112). Thus, Montag is thrust into the realization that his culture is not flawless, but instead is rife with abuses of human freedoms.

The final catalyst that convinces Montag that creativity is not to be destroyed is his last job as a fireman. He is taken to an old woman's house, and he finds hundreds of books that "fell like slaughtered birds" when the "suddenly odious" firefighters walked among them (Bradbury 35-6). Montag feels the woman's presence in the house; he feels her accusations, and he suddenly feels guilty about his actions. The firefighters pour kerosene on all the books, and when they are ready to set the blaze, the woman will refuses to leave her library.

Instead she lights a match herself and sets the house ablaze; she, in effect, commits suicide in defense of her books. When he returns home, Montag cries because it is " [t] his action, while it horrifies Montag, also leads him to equate people with books and books with people" (Touponce 133). Her suicide "causes Montag to question what there is in books that is worth dying for and ultimately leads to his becoming a preserver of books instead of a destroyer" (Wood 148). Thus, the old woman that is willing to die for her books is the catalytic event that causes Montag's discovery of the repressive nature of his society. The next phase of Montag's development shows his open rebellion and his flight from what he cannot change.

Montag begins this stage with the realization that he does not know his wife. He thinks of his wife and discovers that he would not mourn her even if she died: And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain that he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman... (Bradbury 44) Montag tries to discover the allure that books hold by reading the ones that he has stolen over the years.

His superior, Fire Chief Beatty, recognizes what is going on in Montag's life and attempts to bring him back to the firehouse by explaining that books are worthless, that they contradict each other and " [t] he bigger your market... the less you handle controversy" (Bradbury 57). Beatty ends with the statement to " [b] urn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean", which shows the view of fire as a destroyer, a machine that cleanses the world of the danger of controversy inherent in all books (Bradbury 60). However, Montag is not convinced of Beatty's view of books because he realizes there must be something in them that could cause the old woman to commit suicide. Instead Montag turns to an old English professor for insight into books. Faber becomes an important force in the novel because he is the opposite of Beatty.

He represents "quiet, nourishing flame of independent creative imagination" while Beatty represents "the annihilating function of fire" (Watt 41). It is Montag's destiny to choose between these two characters. Faber also propels Montag further into his transformation. Montag, with Faber's help, openly rebels against his society by becoming a spy in his own firehouse.

It is Faber who teaches Montag to love books, he is the "intellectual and didactic" force in Montag's life (Watt 41). He tells Montag that books "show the pores in the face of life"; they are not afraid to show the ugly details (Bradbury 83). Thus, with Faber's help Montag is able to recognize his own transformation: " ' [o] nl y one week ago, pumping a kerosene hose, I thought: God, what fun' " (Bradbury 89). This stage in Montag's life ends with his murder of Beatty.

Beatty taunts him, telling Montag that "fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure... [a], aesthetic, practical" (Bradbury 115). Beatty describes the aspect of fire as a purifier, a cleanser of all evils. Therefore, Montag fittingly destroys Beatty with his own fire. At last Montag has broken free from his society, symbolically killing the only person who had any control over him: the captain of the firehouse. The last stage in Montag's transformation shows him completing the circle from becoming a destroyer of books to a preserver.

Montag runs away from his society, and in doing so he separates himself "from the majority permanently" (Hoskins on 3). He runs, perused by the Mechanical Hound, as millions of mindless people watch on remote TV screens. Technology has become hateful to Montag; he is watched by TV cameras and almost killed by thrill-seeking teenagers in a fast car. The only way that he can escape "the urban world of destructive technology" is to " [join] the nurturing forest world" (Huntington 113).

Finally in order to escape, Montag travels by river into the countryside. Montag's journey down the river is important because it "mark [s] the beginning of a transition, a rebirth through water, a rite of passage that detests Montag entirely of his Fireman persona" (Touponce 139). The water of the river has the effect of quenching the destructive fiery side of Montag, and therefore, allowing him to progress towards becoming a book himself (Touponce 139). The final experience that Montag needs in order to become a living book, a man who carries a book inside of him, is the one he gains from seeing the campfire in the wilderness, and "for the first time in his life [he] realizes that fire need not be destructive, that in providing warmth it can be benign" (Huntington 113). Thus, Montag is now able to become a book, unimportant except for the book carried in his head. He has become one of a few people who are dedicated to preserving books for future generation through stark memorization.

Montag learns about humankind through a member of this group. He is told that mankind is very similar to the mythological beast, the phoenix, in that humans burn up their society, and then rises from the ashes in order to burn up again. The only difference a fellow book-person, tells Montag, is that " [we] know all the... silly things we " ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that... someday we " ll stop making... funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them" (Bradbury 163). Thus, Montag is able to come to the full realization of the benefit of books as well as the dual nature of fire to both help and hurt.

Montag comes full circle in Fahrenheit 451 because he has progressed from his ignorance to becoming one of the few people who are brave enough to defy society by preserving books. The final message Bradbury leaves in the novel is a message of hope. Montag, who carries a piece of the Bible in his mind, returns to the city in hopes of resurrecting it after a bomb had destroyed it. His one desire is to search and perhaps find his wife. In the last few lines he quotes the Book of Revelations: " [a] nd on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Bradbury 165). This quote assures mankind that they "must have faith and endure before [they] can enjoy the fruits of victory" (Sisario 107).

The lasting moral is that in order to overcome the continual destruction and rebirth of mankind, the human race must use its creative mind and intellect (Sisario 107). Thus, Montag, along with the human race, was burnt to ashes at the beginning of the book, and at the end was reborn with a wholly new outlook on his society and a plan to prevent his consumption by fire hereafter.