Fahrenheit 451 Character Analysis

Words: 852
Pages: 4

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a book read by English classes nationwide. Also known as “The Classic Bestseller about Censorship”. Guy Montag, a firefighter who ironically endorses the use of fire to eradicate books, struggles to find his place in life. He lives in a world of self-destruction where everyone is brainwashed by fast-paced technology, and anything controversial is obliterated. A war in the community doesn’t exist to the zombie-like citizens. In the midst of all the turmoil, Montag meets a young girl that makes him question everything he’s ever known. He begins sneaking books, hoping for enlightenment past the realms present, resulting in him nearly being seized for his transgressions to society. He then murders his firefighting team that attempts to arrest him and becomes a
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The reader is incapable of relating with the characters, reason being they are portrayed in such a malevolent way that the characters appear too fantasized. Guy Montag is the most developed character and with that said, he is still hard to identify with. Throughout the book, Montag just has an unsettling sense of emptiness. On several pages, through both thoughts and dialogue, it is mentioned that he would not be sad if his wife died (Bradbury 155). Montag was also able to kill Beatty without giving the murder much thought (Bradbury 119). Montag is the main character and is supposedly perceived as the “good guy”. Through perception and action, his character is too contradictory to be believable. Montag’s wife, Mildred, is shown as more or less a selfish, brainwashed imbecile due to the fact that she watches TV. She is so overly obsessed with her TV shows that she refers to them as her family (Bradbury 49). Throughout the book she has hardly any dialogue and has too extreme characteristics to be believable. Bradbury fails to fully develop character and create characters the reader can relate