Archive - "One Book" 2003: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradury

About the Book & Author

Adapted from Teacher's Guide by Alice Jones-Miller. Ms. Jones-Miller is an editor and writer living in Westchester County, New York.

“Three years ago I wrote a short novel entitled 'The Fire Man' which told the story of a municipal department in the year 1999 that came to your house to start fires instead of to put them out."
--Ray Bradbury, 1953

Fahrenheit 451, the 1953 reincarnation of "The Fire Man," presents ideas that are far more complex than that brief description indicates. This novel warns of a future populated by non-readers and non-thinkers; a lost people with no sense of their history. At the same time, it salutes those who dedicate their lives to the preservation and passing on of knowledge, and testifies to the quiet or passionate courage of the rebel with a cause. Fahrenheit 451 also poses questions about the role(s) of government: Should it reflect the will of the people? Should government do the people's thinking for them?

Plot Summary

There is power in the fire hose, the power to sweep the legs out from under history and bring it crashing down. The power to change things. This power is the one certainty in the life of Guy Montag, a thirty-year-old fireman, and wielding it thrills him. Then he meets Clarisse McClellan, his new neighbor, almost seventeen, and different, and their meeting changes him.

Their first conversation is strange, especially in light of the fact that although he is the elder of the two it is she who brings up all sorts of recollections of the past, when firemen used to put fires out, when billboards were only twenty feet long and not two hundred (they were lengthened, she says, because the cars whizzed by too swiftly for drivers to read the shorter signs). Clarisse asks startling questions, too: "Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"--a notion that Montag laughingly dismisses. "Are you happy?" He ponders this one long after they part.

After this puzzling yet refreshing encounter, Montag discovers his wife, Mildred, lying unconscious in their bedroom, having swallowed a deadly dose of sleeping pills. He summons medical help immediately and soon, thanks to two snake-like machines that suction out the poisons and pump in fresh blood, she is restored.

The next morning, Mildred is vibrant. Oblivious to the previous night's events, she becomes engrossed in the broadcasts beamed onto the larger-than-life TV walls in their living room. Now Montag is the depressed one; he goes out for a walk and again he meets Clarisse. This time she is out savoring the rainfall, and when she dashes off to a psychiatric appointment (school officials consider her pensiveness, curiosity, and nonconformist behavior abnormal), Montag tilts his head back and tastes the rain himself. This from a man who only one day before could not remember the last time he'd noticed the dew on the grass or the man in the moon.

At work that night Montag is menaced, though not attacked, by the Mechanical Hound. An amalgam of police dog, spider, and computer, the Hound has one function, to track down enemies of the state (people who read books, for example) and render them helpless with sleep-inducing drugs. Montag's boss, Captain Beatty, makes light of the incident when Montag reports it, teasing the fireman about having something to hide. Montag wonders if Beatty suspects the stash of books he has pilfered during house raids.

Every day for a week Clarisse walks Montag to the subway, always surprising him with little gifts from nature or with stories about her life, about life in general, about the past. She tells him that she is considered anti-social because of her distaste for racing around in cars, sports, watching classroom lectures on TV (no live teachers), and violence. She speaks of the days her uncle has told her about, when children did not kill each other and when pictures were not all abstract, but sometimes "said things and even showed people." At the end of this week, though, Clarisse suddenly disappears. The Hound threatens Montag more boldly than ever. And a particularly distressing fire call claws at Montag's conscience: a woman, betrayed by a neighbor, sets herself aflame, along with her books and her house, before the awestruck firemen have a chance to light the kerosene--but not before Montag snatches up another book for his forbidden collection.

Shaken by these events and by Mildred's news of Clarisse's possibly fatal accident (Mildred isn't sure whether the girl actually died, but her family has moved away), Montag feels too sickened to face another day at the firehouse. Like a truant officer, Captain Beatty comes to call at Montag's bedside, apprising him of the true history of book burning--which, according to Beatty, began without the lighting of a single flame but instead with the advent of mass communications; the masses, says Beatty, wanted all information boiled down to a "paste-pudding norm," to "snap endings"--like those provided by the TV parlor shows that fascinate Mildred but disgust Montag, who finds them meaningless.

As Beatty speaks, Mildred discovers a book hidden behind her husband's pillow. Beatty, who doesn't actually see the book, nevertheless assures Montag that curious firemen have swiped books before and that if such a fireman turns the book in within twenty-four hours, there is no harm done.

After Beatty's departure, Montag reveals his cache of books to Mildred. He pleads with her to sift through the books with him for any bits of enlightenment that can save the couple from the desolate future gaping before them--an ever-growing estrangement between them; a community rife with suicide and violence; a world at war constantly, perhaps endlessly.

Not being able to make sense of the books, Montag visits a retired English professor, Faber, whom he had met in a park the year before. (At that time, although sure Faber was concealing a book, Montag had not reported him; instead he talked to him and listened to poetry.) Using a rare book, the Bible, as bait, Montag coaxes Faber into becoming his ally. Faber gives him a tiny transmitting device for secret long distance communication; through this Faber will be able to advise Montag on-the-spot during his next meeting with Captain Beatty.

Back at home, enraged by the alternatively trivial and callous dinnertime conversation of Mildred's visiting friends and by their obsession with the TV parlor, Montag recklessly whips out a book of poetry and reads to them. The distraught women (including his own wife) report him to the authorities and Beatty forces Montag to set fire to his own house. But when the transmitter drops out of Montag's ear in front of Beatty, exposing Faber to possible discovery, Montag turns the flamethrower onto Beatty and then the Mechanical Hound.

Now a fugitive from the law he once gleefully enforced, Montag races to Faber's house and with the professor's assistance evades a second Hound and escapes to the river. Soon he joins a band of hobos who turn out to be walking, talking "books"--they've memorized the words, storing them for the times and places where people will be willing to listen.

This is a time of endings and new beginnings, for Montag and for the world as he knows it: a massive bombardment levels the city he has just fled. Perhaps his newly acquired knowledge--the Book of Ecclesiastes--will be a valued commodity in the new world that rises from the ashes.

About the Author

When Mr. Electrico, a magician with a traveling show, came to Waukegan, Illinois, during the 1920s, a twelve year-old boy was among the lucky youngsters selected for a special honor. Once Mr. Electrico tapped young Ray Bradbury on the shoulder with a sword and directed him to "live forever," the boy "…was changed forever. I will grow up, [he] thought, and become like him. I will be the greatest magician who ever walked the world."

While the young Bradbury indeed spent time as an amateur magician in Waukegan, it was the magic of mastering the written word that ultimately captivated him, of capturing and, at the same time, freeing the words, spinning them into fantastic tales that entertain, perplex, frighten, stimulate thought, and inspire dreams.

The boy went on collecting his Buck Rogers and Prince Valiant comics and reading the works of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs and when he moved with his parents and older brother to Tucson, Arizona, in 1932, Ray read comic strips over the air on a radio show for children. He also began writing short stories in Tucson...

And he never stopped. In 1934 the family moved again, this time to Los Angeles. Here Ray won accolades from high school peers for his participation in and writing for theater. After graduation in 1938 he found himself a small office, sold his first story at age twenty, and before twenty-five was already selling a story a month, to Weird Tales, Mademoiselle, Collier's, and others. Bradbury has since been published in such diverse publications as The Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, and Harpers. An imaginative marketer of his stories, he would send and sell them to magazines that did not usually print fiction--Gourmet and Life, for example.

How many stories has he written? Who's counting? Enough to fill at least twenty published collections of his own stories. Enough to have contributed to more than seven hundred anthologies. Then there are the screenplays: among them "Moby Dick," the 1956 film based on the Herman Melville classic; "Something Wicked This Way Comes," a 1983 Disney film based on Bradbury's 1962 book of the same name; and "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" from his story "The Foghorn." There are teleplays for "Twilight Zone" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." There are stage plays and poetry. And there are his novels: his first, Fahrenheit 451 (brought to the screen by François Truffaut in 1966) and The Martian Chronicles (a 1980 NBC- TV mini-series).

How much has he written? Take a clue from his words: "I'm accustomed, you see, to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter, and in an hour I've created a world." And from this, his advice to aspiring young writers: to start disciplining themselves early in their careers, he says, they should put down "one or two thousand words everyday for the next twenty years." He has garnered many awards for his writing, including one from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Fahrenheit 451, an Academy Award nomination for a 1963 short film, "Icarus Montgolfier Wright," and a World Fantasy Award for life achievement.