Fahrenheit 451 A secret friend, a lunatic of a wife, a rival foe, and a life full of lies. Guy Montag is a fireman living in a dystopian world where book burning is a custom and innovative idealism is rejected. Montag endures countless fires and hopeless companions to realize the corruption that is his civilization and the beauty of the natural and independant world. In the novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury reveals the ideas that a person known is a person loved and there is always good in something bad. This becomes clear with Montag’s interaction with his people and his perception of the meaning of fire. Throughout the story, Montag realizes that whether or not he liked his acquaintances, he still cared for them and thought of them in …show more content…
When Montag is sent out with his brigade to burn down a book owner’s house, Montag sees that the owner stayed in the house and burned down with it. “There must be something in books… to make a woman stay in a burning house ” (51). Montag realizes that there must be something - something important, something worthwhile - to cause a person to commit suicide and die with that knowledge. At the start of the story, Montag sees fire as just a way to clean up, a way to keep things in line, a way to turn white pages into black ash. But fire develops a different meaning than that. Fire becomes a way to hide something. To destroy evidence. To shadow a bright thought in even brighter flames. Montag has been opened up to see past his own society. Later in the story, once escaping the city on the eve of war, Montag comes across a group of friends by a campfire. “A strange fire because it meant something to him… [fire] could give as much as it could take” (145-146). Away from the corrupt civilization of censorship and conflagration, Montag sees even more in fire than he had seen before. Before, fire had been a way to shut down life and shadow the natural mind and rational world. But now, Montag sees fire in the light of starting a new life. Fire becomes a way to get rid of the past and look toward the future. The development of fire