preview

How Does Montag Change In Fahrenheit 451

Good Essays

What if you were stuck in a society that was devoid of any personality? What if you went home everyday to a family who didn’t care about themselves, much less you? It would be horrible, and we, as humans in our current society would see that as monstrous and dull. But this is the world that Guy Montag, as fireman in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, has to endure. His job as a fireman is not to put out fires, but to start them, specifically getting rid of the filth that this world perceives books as. And while he has been content to do his job for ten years, Montag’s view of the world around him starts to change as a girl makes him question all he has ever know. She makes him question the primary basis or teaching of his society, which …show more content…

As Montag starts to have these revelations, he begins to challenge all of these wrongs, not because he thinks he can fix them, but because he hopes by at least acknowledging and fighting against these obvious faults, he can bring happiness, or at least meaning to his life.

Perhaps the most obvious of the aspects that Montag challenges was the ban on books. This is the one rule in Fahrenheit 451 that all citizen must follow, that all books are strictly prohibited, except for a few government mandated ones. We know that Montag has worked his whole life as a fireman, which means that he has always been in close proximity to books. This gives him a unique advantage over a regular citizen, being that if he ever wanted to start taking books, it would be pretty easy for him. Montag sees books daily, and nobody ever checks to see if every book that that person was in possession of was burnt, probably because only that singular person actually knows how many books they ever had. So if Montag ever wanted to take even one book, it would be pretty easy of him. And that’s exactly what Montag does, “His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of it’s own,

Get Access