How Did Guy Montag Change In Fahrenheit 451

In the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, main character Guy Montag has many inner conflictions with himself, throughout the story. One of those main conflictions is his thought or opinion of fire. His own opinions are constantly being changed and conflicted with as the book progresses and as he goes through his world trying to find the difference between fire and burning. As the book begins we read that Guy Montag thinks to himself, “It was a pleasure to burn.” – Page 1. He then continues on about how he loves things (books) to be destroyed, changed, and pretty much forgotten as time continues on and people’s memories of these books falter. Which, as he believes, is right and justifiable. But, as the book continues, we see that Montag’s …show more content…
He never really thought about, anything, really, but Clarisse opened his eyes. She made him think about society and in particular, the reason of why they burn books. You can tell this by when he says to Beatty on page 31, “I’ve tried to imagine, just how it would feel. I mean, to have firemen burn our houses and our books.” As you can tell from this he is starting to understand that using fire as a weapon of destruction is more painful than you think and can imagine. You can also see this portrayed when on page 46 Montage asks Mildred, “Where’s the aspirin?” and then when she asks, “Did something happen?” he responds, “A fire is all.” As you can see from this he is starting to see the bad side of the fires and is no longer feeling joy from burning people, houses, and books as he did before. Now as we near the end of the book we hear Granger say the word “Phoenix” on page 156. A phoenix is a biblical bird that after many years, will burn itself up, and then resurrect itself from the ashes, but the bird has no idea what it just did. This is quite like fire itself, because through it you can be destroyed, but sometimes for rebirth you first need destruction. With the society in this book it is the same idea. At the end of the book a bomb flattens the city, but when Montag arrives at the city he will be there to lead any survivors down a new path of books, knowledge, and

Show More