Character Analysis Of Guy From 'Fahrenheit 451'

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Even before he meets Clarisse McClellan, Guy is not an ordinary guy. He has inklings that all is not right with his world, he hasn’t turned in a clearly renegade individual (Faber, whom he met in the park spewing poetry), and he’s been squirreling away books behind his ventilator grill for quite some time now. He’s inquisitive, intelligent, and free-thinking. Good for him, right? Except in his world, this is all highly illegal. Guy can’t stand around congratulating himself for being an individual. In his mind, he’s a traitor. Even worse, he’s a fireman traitor, which is essentially tantamount to being a dirty cop. When you look at it from Guy’s perspective, it’s no wonder he basically bounces from one personal crisis to the next for most of the novel. What kind of crises, you ask? When Montag can’t deal with the guilt, he starts messing with his sense of self. That’s right – this is the ol’ identity crisis. It begins with Clarisse asking if he’s happy. Montag feels “his body divide itself […], the two halves grinding one upon the other.” This is our tip-off to look for identity stuff, and once we do, it’s everywhere. Montag imagines that his new, rebellious half isn’t him at all, but is really Clarisse. When he speaks, he imagines her talking through his mouth. Later, when…show more content…
“I don’t want to change sides and just be told what to do. There’s no reason to change if I do that,” he says. What Guy will soon learn is that wisdom is about experience as much as it is about intellect and knowledge. To become the man he is at the end of the novel – a man headed toward the city with epiphanic thoughts – he has to leave behind the world of technology and head into the world of nature. He has to see his city bombed and pick himself up off the ground afterwards. In doing so, he experiences the very lesson he’s been trying to learn since he first picked that Bible from out behind the ventilator
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