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Essay On Living But Not Alive In The Novel 'Fahrenheit 451'

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Living but Not Alive
What is it to live life when life is but controlled by not you or any one person but, the people who never lived at all? “Fahrenheit 451” is a novel about censorship. People in the novel are living everyday lives but yet none are really living. They watch shows that have no story line or names like on (page 46) “They said mildred, well they just had this fight you see. They certainly fight a lot. You should listen. I Think they're married yes they're married. Why?” They drive so fast they never see anything, do the same things everyday, are ridiculed for being different. The people of the novel are machines set on auto pilot, except a few. Montag, Faber, Clarissa, Beauty, and so many more people are unique in this book. But with all different beliefs they as individual characters could become a book themselves. But once again what is it to live when life is but controlled by not you or any one person but, the people who never lived at all?
Firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” did not put out fires they started them. They used a mechanical hound which is …show more content…

Montag's wife on (pages 17-19) tries to kill herself because she is depressed. She doesn't remember it and gets offended by what montag says. The men who come and pump out her stomach say it's nothing new to them. They don't need a paramedic or a ambulance. That she will be fine that all they have to do is use this crude machine to poop everything out of her and put in some new fluid in her. That the fluids inside her where evil. Montag is deeply disturbed by that. He thinks that these machines how inhuman they are like the mechanical hound but yet alive do as they please. The machine is this represents forgetting. The machine replaces one with the other. Just as the hound takes what it wants and destroyed the other. The hound is perceived as censorship. But both machines in the book are alive but yet not living, and do not have a soul but think on their

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Clarisse -the only person who appears to be alive;- and Faber -the owner of knowledge unused,- share their thoughts and feelings about how to find true meaning in life. Throughout the novel, Guy Montag appears as a dynamic, three dimensional character, because he illustrates the changes that come about through acquiring knowledge; he undergoes dramatic internal changes while presenting himself as a relatable human who struggles against his own flaws. Guy Montag proves to be a dynamic character in Fahrenheit 451 because of the momentous changes he makes in his life. An example of can be found in how his opinion about burning books changes throughout the text; at the beginning he believed that “it was a pleasure to burn...to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.” (Bradbury 3)

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In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Montag, the protagonist and book burner, battles between the light and dark sides of society, first with Beatty, his boss, and the government and then with Clarisse, a neighbor girl and Faber, an English professor. Montag is stuck in the dark burning books and is ignorant to the world around him. He moves towards greater awareness when he meets Clarisse and is awakened to the wonders of deep thought and books. Finally, he risks his life by trying to save the books.

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The mechanical hound could remember 10,000 scents. It has to be programed by a person to track something. Montag has trouble trying to figure out if the hound is tracking him. Montag always thought, “The hound, he thought. It’s out there tonight.

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As it says in the front of Fahrenheit 451 before it even begins, “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way,” Montag does not care about breaking the rules anymore (1). As Beatty told Montag, when nobody read books anymore because of technology, they eventually started getting rid of books all together. The government wanted everyone to be equal, and they did not want anyone being smarter than anyone else by reading books. Montag decides he wants to get out the books he has been hiding in his ventilator grille. Montag begins to learn: “I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly, even of foolishness and madness” (King James Bible, Ecc. 7.25).

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