Fahrenheit 451 was basically about a guy named Guy Montag, is a firemen who lives in a society where books and buildings are burned by firemen instead of being extinguished by them. The thing that spices the book up is while everyone is fine with their lives and his fellow firemen don’t mind burning books and all that, Montag is the complete opposite and he comes to question nearly everything in his life. His line of work gives him a moral dilemma and he starts to wonder whether his marriage is strong and if he really loves his wife. This leads him to do something to change it. That entails devising a plan to obtain books (in unorthodox methods) in hopes of trying to save them in a way. What happens as result of this is up to the reader to find out. One recurring theme from this book was that society can weigh heavily on someone that attempts to rebel against it and makes said person do things they normally would not.
One way the author shows this theme is by showing the reader the comparison between Montag’s life before and after he discovers/learns about books. Before he finds out about books at the beginning of the story, he seems very sad and unhappy, as if he was just making due with what he was forced into, but yearning for something more than it. However, this could partly be Clarisse’s fault. In the book it says ” A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon…”. This shows that Montag is just doing what society asks of him and unlike other people around him, this isn’t enough to satisfy him. That idea of him being set aside from the rest of the people around him is also repeated several times in the story and serves as a stimulus for what he wants to do. Also, in the story, the scene where Montag burns down the house of an innocent old lady provides Montag with a sense of self-revelation because that is when he truly realized that he felt nasty about what he was doing.
However, things start to change towards the middle of the story when he does indeed discover books. He does it in such a way that I suppose he really satisfied himself. What he ended up doing is smuggling a large amount of books and hiding them in his house, starting with one book and then slowly adding to his collection over time. In the book Mildred said ” He’s gonna find us and burn us and the books!” Showing us that although Montag is taking steps to change his life, certain consequences are starting to arise. That mostly includes putting him and possibly his wife in danger. But there are some good things that come from this. For instance, he re-meets an old acquaintance named Mr. Faber. The story says “His name was Faber, and when he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a cadenced voice, looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when an hour had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a rhymeless poem.” This long, detailed sentence shows that they really had a deep connection. The fact that he was an old English teacher has an influence on the degree to which the two of them hit it off (which is indeed a very high one). This relationship allows Montag to face his antagonist in the story, Captain Beatty.
Montag does start making a lot of rash, questionable decisions following his discovery of books and all that they have to offer him. Although some people may argue he was bound to do things such as those, because he was a tad bit crazy all along. The people that hypothetically pose that argument have a viable argument to make indeed. At the start of the story he always talked to his wife in an odd, passive aggressive type of way which could be an incipient stage of his possible mental disorder. Also, I think that Mildred’s mental issues could have rubbed off on him because, honestly it’s not that far off to think that. Overall, his bad decisions seemed to be more progressively getting worse and more frequently along with him getting into books. So that’s why I feel like it’s not a mental issue it’s just him acting out of character to match up with how his life is going. Because he doesn’t just have a normal life he can’t just be his normal self.
By the end of the story, Montag had already messed up nearly ever thing that gave him at least a little sense of normalcy. This is showed at not the absolute end of the story but at the very near end when his and Faber’s water- and -ice dynamic fails against Captain Beatty and things really start to go downhill. This is stated in the book when Beatty says ” .. Montag wanted to fly near the light and now he’s burnt his wings…” This tells the reader that not only does Montag know that he is making poor decisions, it’s beginning to become apparent to others around him. Beatty goes on to strike the final blow against poor Montag when he talks him into thinking that he’s failed and burning his own house to the ground. Then this moment of self- revelation lead Montag to follow suit in the striking of blows, even though he had a substantially less amount of control over his situation, so he brutally murdered Beatty with the flamethrower that was conveniently already in his hand.
Although that seems like a perfectly good, but slightly underwhelming ending, there’s even more to It than that. Montag, already a fugitive by this part of the story, flees to find Faber who he thought was really the only one that could really help him in this particular situation. And help him he did, he helped to not get caught for his terrible crime although this could be said to be bound to happen regardless of his help. Nevertheless, after Montag’s visit to Faber, he is forced to bid old Faber farewell as he descends on a trip to a place that even he doesn’t know. This happens as a result of everything and everyone in his life pretty much being gone at the end of the story. It truly is kind of depressing to think that all his family and true friends end up dying but after all he is partly to blame for this because he failed to realize that he didn’t love his wife and make real connections with people while using his own volition. But, miraculously he ends u finding a group of intellectuals whose job is to memorize famous literature and he ends up fitting right in with them. That leads the reader to be at least a little content at the end of the story as well as knowing the fact the Montag helps this group rebuild his city that was recently blow up.