Armor In Mark Twain's Fahrenheit 451

Armor in a battle has the purpose to not only provide protection to the person but also unify an army. Also attributed to armor worn in medieval times was the heavy weight that it bore on the shoulders of the soldiers and overall making it inefficient. Twain includes passages for each of these attributes failing for the armor to represent the inefficiency of the government and parliament. Specifically, this is displayed through the armor’s attributes of giving protection and unifying the soldiers.
The armor is often taken as a last line of protection for many soldiers. Twain uses armor to symbolize a protection of the knights’ thoughts and ideology and thus, the stubbornness of the whole hierarchical system to receiving new ideas. This portrays

Hank had to get into the core of the government to stifle with the ideology just enough for him to start seeing results. In the novel, a strong example of the armor proving to be useless is when hank jousts the knights in armor and as the crowd sees that Sir Sagramore is down and when inspecting him they observe “There was a hole through the breast of his chain mail, but they attached no importance to a little thing like that” (299). The armor not only is proven useless but by allowing the bullet to penetrate and cause harm is

This allows someone who can identify one knight to be able to identify all the knights. In the novel, Twain presents this unifying standard between the armored knights as being slow minded and failing to think for oneself or thick cleverly. Since the very first time that Hank is around the knights, he notes that “There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that” (22). Twain adds this quotation to exploit the idea that since a monarch government lacks a variety of representation, the government hierarchy such are a unified group all simple minded and do not have to think for themselves. Twain illustrates the inefficiency of the knights’ unified thoughts and actions in Hank’s jousting matches. Hank describes the events by saying “When I had snaked out five men out, things began to look serious to the ironclads, and they stopped and consulted” (297). The knights in armor have the same strategy in beating the Yankee and that is by using a simple lance, and even after consultation, they conclude to bring out another knight with the same plan. The armor that they all wear confine them to a unified slow thinking that does not advance them any closer to their goal. This symbolism is Twain’s way of demonstrating the failure