Guy Montag only knew the means of burning off problems when they began to be too much to handle. Montag begins to ponder on what fire is, he perceives it as “a mystery… its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it” (Bradbury 49). This shows how Montag felt, what he has been taught to believe as a fireman, and how the government deals with problems in which they do not have a solution for or do not want to deal with. Alan Lenhoff wrote an article over how authors use fire as a symbol and specifically focuses on the novel Fahrenheit 451. Lenhoff discusses how the fire destroyed more than just books despite what many people may perceive. In the novel, Montag’s fire chief, Captain Beatty, visits him at home after the unusual way he acted at the previous house burning. Captain Beatty described that “a book is a loaded gun” that needs to be inaccessible to anyone so that it cannot create harm to explain why their jobs are important and rid Montag of any doubt that burning books are wrong (Bradbury 26). Beatty discusses how the