Plot Summary

Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel. It deals with a time in the future when firemen are no longer required to protect buildings because technology has improved significantly. Instead, they burn books because literature is considered a threat to authority. However, comedies, light fiction and business journals are deemed worthy of reclamation. Civilization is marked by the relentless chasing of superficiality, philistinism and social apathy coupled with avarice, cruelty and meaninglessness. Seashells, a kind of headphones, keep people informed about the happenings in the city, and huge television screens bombard people with “images”, providing them continuous entertainment. These new intrusions replace the role played by families in a society. Humanitarian medical care has given way to fly-by-night “operators.” All serious literature is proscribed to prevent people from thinking.

The government decides to censor books because it finds difficult to please the growing minorities:

dog lovers, cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. (p. 57)

Moreover, books, and academia as a whole, destroy the foundation of democracy because they establish a hierarchy among people in terms of their intelligence (“Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him” [ibid]). Therefore, to support democracy all differences had to be ironed out. This could only be achieved by stifling academia, and thinking per se. A few years before the story of Fahrenheit 451 unfolded, “the will of the people” provoked a brutal campaign whereby books were torched, liberal arts were sidelined, and people were warned against gathering and discussing issues. Besides, they could not take walks, contemplative or general. Those who opposed these measures were put under the charge of psychiatrists and treated for their “abnormal behavior” or imprisoned.

Guy Montag was a third-generation fireman who inherited the coveted job of burning books. His logo was “451,” the temperature at which paper used in books catches fire.

The novel begins with Guy Montag’s meeting with Clarissa McClellan, who is a curious 16-year-old girl. She encourages him to reflect on life, asks him to introspect if he is happy, and tells him that she finds him to be an aberration. Montag cannot help thinking about Clarissa. He likes going on walks with her, and hearing her talk about her strange family who spend time together talking. Montag’s meeting with Clarissa makes him open himself to the wonders of nature, and brood about his existence.

Montag’s wife, Mildred, is wedded to her television “family”, which solely takes up all her time. She thinks she is “happy” and attaches no significance to aspects of her married life. It appears that Montag’s feelings for her are unreciprocated.

Montag cannot bear the foolhardiness and insensitivity prevailing in society. He is disturbed by the cruelty, indifference, torpor and impersonal relations found in Civilization. His interaction with Clarissa triggers dissatisfaction in him. It gets exacerbated by his post facto discovery of Clarissa’s death, when she is knocked down by a car. He is shaken by the fact that his wife gave him the news a few days after the accident happened, in spite of Clarissa being their neighbor. When Mrs. Blake immolates herself along with the books in her library, he is further distressed. He steals a book from the remains to investigate the reason for her decision. He is further infuriated when he discovers that those treating his wife, who took an overdose of sedatives, are impersonal. These incidents motivate Montag to quit his job, but Beatty and Mechanical Hound keep a tab on him. Beatty tells Montag that firefighters are quite tempted to steal books, but can save their skin by returning them within twenty-four hours. This makes Montag intimate his wife that he had concealed, over the course of many years, nearly twenty books inside the air-conditioners vent. He also establishes contact with Faber, a retired professor whom he had met previously in a park.

On the subway, Montag commits Ecclesiastes to memory from the sole copy of the Bible remaining in the country. He pleads with Faber to teach him. Faber asks Montag to donate his savings to a former printer who can print books that can be distributed after the War ends and a new civilization dawns. Faber wishes to introduce firemen to books so that it leaves them bewildered, and perhaps incite a revolution. He gives Montag an auditory device he had put together long ago so that both of them can be in constant touch.

On reaching home, Montag meets Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles, whom Mildred had invited for a get-together. He is disgusted by their fetish about the “family” (the unremitting television), their snobbery and philistinism. In desperation, he reads them a poem titled “Dover Beach:”

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of new dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light…

And we are here as on a darkening plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night (100)

Montag’s recitation does not go well with the three listeners. Montag returns the book to Beatty. He is ordered to participate in a firebombing, only to find that it is his own house. He comes to know that Mildred had exposed him to danger.

Faber alerts Montag through the earphone to flee. But the gadget falls out, and is discovered by Beatty. In a fit, Montag directs the flamethrower on Beatty, and, surprisingly, Beatty does not resist. Montag assaults two firemen named Stoneman and Black who were observing him, and then blows up the Mechanical Hound. During his risky escape, Montag is nearly knocked down by a car driven by teenagers. He places a book in Mrs. Black’s house and calls the fire station. Later, when he goes to Faber’s house, both of them are warned by Faber’s television that an imported Mechanical Hound has been summoned to locate him by odor. Montag asks Faber for a valise of his old clothes, and requests him to erase all traces after he leaves. Faber directs him to go along the railway track to the forest. Montag covers the last leg running through the village. Meanwhile, the Seashell orders the villages to come out and look for a fleeing stranger. On reaching the river, he changes into Faber’s clothes and lets himself be carried downstream. In the meantime, the Mechanical Hound sniffs around in Faber’s house, tarries awhile, and moves on to the river where it waits for some time before returning.

Montag reaches the other bank of the river and warily follows the railway tracks in the darkness of night till he sees refugees waiting for him around a campfire. They introduce themselves as wanted members of academia. Each of them has memorized a particular book that they will orally pass on to their children who, when the War ends the world is prepared, will transmit their contents to a new civilization that will, expectedly, be more tolerant to intellectualism.

Later, the War breaks out. Montag comes to know that Faber and his wife are killed. The novel concludes with Montag and the refugees moving on to a supposedly better future.