Happiness plays an important and necessary role in the lives of people around the world. In America, happiness has been a necessity in our daily lives since Thomas Jefferson stated these famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, of Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Since then, Americans have been engaged in that act, pursuing happiness. However, as Ray Bradbury demonstrates in Fahrenheit 451, that special elements in our life which make us happy initially may eventually lead to our downfall. Beatty, the fire chief, has a contentious job which pulls him …show more content…
Rather than fighting Montag, Beatty simply accepts his death as if he didn't have anything to lose. As Beatty took his death the way it was presented to him, Montag later realizes that the fire chief wanted to die, demonstrating an extreme dissatisfaction with his life. Beatty's self-destruction is very much a symbol of the sick world he represents that needs to be cleansed. It was as if he went through life, doing his job day by day without a special purpose or reason. As he always criticized books when he states "What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives." (Bradbury 107) When Beatty states that books are traitors and useless and then uses them in his everyday setting he is not only being narcissistic but also hiding the fact that he actually loves books and is proving that they are useful which is contradictory to what he is preaching. As both Beatty’s death and his knowledge of literature prove that he was unhappy in life and did not have a purpose for life but didn't have an excuse for his timely death. He could have avoided his death just by focusing what brings him true happiness. As every American is after the true pursuit of happiness the fact is that Bradbury did the opposite and focused on what could come with strict and fixed rules that detain people from doing what makes them truly