On the subway to Faber’s house he tries to memorize a passage of the Bible, fearing that he’ll have to turn it in to Beatty, but he is distracted by an advertising jingle. Faber is hesitant to help Montag at first, saying that an attempt to change society would be futile since people stopped reading of their own accord. But he agrees to contact a retired printer and assist Montag’s plan to sabotage fire stations. But before they can proceed, an alarm comes into the station – on Montag’s own house. Mildred placed the call, fed up after Montag read poetry to a group of her friends.
Michael Barnard 12/10/12 English Paper New vs. Old In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury the main character Montag is a fireman who burns books for a living. In the society that they live in books are illegal to own and to have in your possession, so the society needs people to help carry out the law of having no books. Montag starts to wonder what is so great about books that make people break the law, so he takes a couple from a house that they were supposed to burn down. When his wife finds out he has to beg Mildred to keep it a secret. He developed these temptations from a girl named Clarisse who is starting to catch on to what the past might have been like.
Beatty has a talk with Montag saying that books are not good and that nothing is good about them. “At least one fireman gets an itch. What do the books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh? Well Montag take my word for it, [he has] had to read a few in my time, to know what [fireman] was about, and the books say nothing...[he] come[s] away lost,” (Bradbury 66).
Reevaluation By definition, the antagonist, opposes the protagonist, barring or complicating his or her success. Guy Montag, the protagonist, takes great pride in his work at the fire department. For a living, he burns books and the houses where the books are illegally hidden. At the beginning of the novel, Montag is portrayed as an ideal fireman in his society, enjoying his job and the smell of the kerosene, and believes he is truly happy. However, soon after meeting Clarisse, Montag starts to realize how unhappy he really is.
Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about a materialistic society that has forgotten social interaction with each other. Bradbury examines the personal response of an individual who is in conflict with the majority in his society and whose occupation is abhorrent to him. Fahrenheit 451 centers upon the personal crisis of Montag, a young fireman whose job consists of burning books. He finds his life increasingly meaningless and eventually comes to reject the too-simple, clichéd values of his environment. He experiences loneliness in a society where people are constantly entertained without time given to reflection and personal development, activities often associated with the reading process.
The effective noun ‘bees’ suggests Guy dislikes them because humans, as a group, are not particularly fond of ‘bees’. The verb ‘humming’ suggests Mildred is content and happy and has no care to talk to Montag and as they cannot simply talk to each other it highlights another fault. Guy is noticing these problems and realises that he and Mildred do not love each other as they should. Guy finds that this is common throughout his community and that it isn’t right, so he begins to rebel against it. Initial signs of Montag’s rebellion continue to occur throughout the novel.
In the current day and age, people rarely pick up a book before they fall asleep, and most people probably could not explain what Aldous Huxley wrote. The way of life in Bradbury’s dystopia was to employ firemen to burn intelligence and promote mass ignorance in an act to create an equilibrium of knowledge. Montag’s wife, who was hospitalized after their house was bombed, was scrutinized by robots and robot-like humans to extract every bit of knowledge (human blood) inside of Mildred and replace it with mechanically administered blood. (Bradbury 17). This act showed society’s need for ignorance and a “don’t ask questions, that’s just the way it is” type of system.
Unlike Mildred he likes books. In the novel Fahrenheit 451 Montag is a firemen, and while on his job he likes to take a book, every single time. He hates keeping secrets from his wife, so one night " he reached up and pulled back the grille of the air conditioning system and reached and took out a book. He reached back again and kept pulling out books" (Bradbury 65). Montag thought for himself when he decided to show his wife the books, knowing there was a good chance she would "pull" the alarm on him.
He was making zero progress. Bradbury relates this to Montag’s desperation to memorize the book in his hands, despite the fact that he knows that books are illegal. Sadly, he is greatly distracted by the train radio, making all his efforts futile. “The train radio vomited upon Montag…the people were pounded into submission…‘Lilies of the field’ ‘Denham’s’ ‘Lilies, I said!’” (Bradbury, 79). In this case, the sand is the truth, the information he seeks from the book.
Now Beatty tells Montag why the public lets comic books stay but not the books. The public doesn’t let the books stay because they bashed on people and that doesn’t make people happy so books don’t fit in with society. (57) Beatty told Montag that authors were full of evil thoughts and their thoughts would upset the public. The public was so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. (57) Then Beatty asks Montag, “What do we want in this country, above all?” To be happy and Montag agrees with Beatty.