Fire In Fahrenheit 451

Words: 1248
Pages: 5

“Do not play with the fire” is something that all are taught, but most children- and even adults- still are succumbed to being burned. There is something that causes humans to gravitate towards it. It captures people with its glow, warmth, and mystification. In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, the main character Guy Montag rebels against the dystopian society and everything that he once thought as right. Montag is a fireman that burns books and the houses where books are found while the people that lived there are put in jail. The fires are only at night to create a spectacle for all to see as a warning to obey the law. This is could be how Bradbury holds the attention of readers in focusing on the different views of the fire. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the fire is a significant part of the …show more content…
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