Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel written by Ray Bradbury in the mid-20th century, is a compelling story about a futuristic society when firemen start fires instead of stopping them, books are deemed wrong and illegal, and to try to change things or have individual opinions is considered wrong. Guy Montag is a fireman who has spent the past 10 years setting fires and burning books, but when meets a Clarisse, a 17-year-old girl who notices the problems in their society, he begins questioning it. This soon comes to his fire chief’s attention, and Beatty wastes no time in trying to put a stop to it. However, Beatty is a very complicated character who is facing his own internal turmoil, and is not as simple as Montag makes him out to be. It is evident that Beatty is in conflict with himself with his obvious hypocrisy over knowledge and books and his want to die, and this deeply affects the entire novel.
The first sign of Beatty’s hypocrisy and internal conflict is when readers realize that although he dismisses books as useless and nonsense, he himself has read many books and is well educated in literature. When Beatty first visits Montag, guessing (correctly) that Montag is having doubts about his job, he tells Montag about how their society came to be and why the firemen exist, praising their role as necessary. He claims “the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe.” (Bradbury 62). Although he says he has read books before, which in itself is a crime, he believes