Choosing to be your own person rather than being like everyone else can feel empowering after a struggle. In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, reading books is a crime. A “criminal” who is caught reading a book goes to jail and the fire department has to burn the book. After Montag, a firefighter, finds himself ignoring rules, he is caught by his chief and is forced to run away, in search of new books and people who understand him. After he finds a group of retired professors. After spending some time with these men, an atomic bomb is dropped in the city that he just escaped from. Montag deals with an internal conflict about his reluctance to conform to societal norms which impacts his career, life and family values. After years being on the work force and destroying thousands of books, Montag wants to throw away his …show more content…
From the first instinct of taking a book, Montag was breaking societal expectations.“Now, it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish!”(p.37) This is the first instance that the readers see when Montag fully crosses the line. Even after decades of not reading, he took his chance and decided to go against the world. Montag begins to blur the line between unhappiness with career and life at home. As shown,“He put his hand back up and took out two books and moved his hand down and dropped the two books to the floor. He kept moving his hand and dropping books, small ones, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones. When he was done he looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wife's feet” (p. 65) This shows that he’s been hiding books for a while and