Character Analysis and Novel Themes
Who are the main
characters in 451 and how do they represent and display the prevalent themes
and components of the novel?
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Main Characters
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Guy Montag
Appropriately named after a paper-manufacturing company, Montag is the protagonist of Fahrenheit
451. He is by no means a perfect hero, however. The reader can
sympathize with Montag’s mission, but the steps he
takes toward his goal often seem clumsy and misguided. Montag’s
faith in his profession and his society begins to decline almost immediately
after the novel’s opening passage. Faced with the enormity and complexity of
books for the first time, he is often confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed. As
a result, he has difficulty deciding what to do independently of Beatty,
Mildred, or Faber. Likewise, he is often rash, inarticulate, self-obsessed, and
too easily swayed. At times he is not even aware of why he does things, feeling
that his hands are acting by themselves. These subconscious actions can be
quite horrific, such as when he finds himself setting his supervisor on fire,
but they also represent his deepest desires to rebel against the status quo and
find a meaningful way to live. Clarisse, to the grotesque and
irresponsible, as in his murder of Beatty and his half-baked scheme to
overthrow the firemen.
Mildred Montag
Mildred is the one major character in the book who seems to have no hope of resolving the conflicts within
herself. Her suicide attempt suggests that she is in great pain and that her
obsession with television is a means to avoid confronting her life. But her
true feelings are buried very deep within her. She even appears to be unaware
of her own suicide attempt. She is a frightening character, because the reader
would expect to know the protagonist’s wife very intimately, but she is
completely cold, distant, and unreadable. Her betrayal of Montag
is far more severe than Beatty’s, since she is, after all, his wife. Bradbury
portrays Mildred as a shell of a human being, devoid of any sincere emotional,
intellectual, or spiritual substance. Her only attachment is to the “family” in
the soap opera she watches.
Captain Beatty
Beatty is a complex character, full of contradictions. He is a
book burner with a vast knowledge of literature, someone who obviously cared
passionately about books at some point. It is important to note that Beatty’s
entire speech to Montag describing the history of the
firemen is strangely ambivalent, containing tones of irony, sarcasm, passion,
and regret, all at once. Beatty calls books treacherous weapons, yet he uses
his own book learning to manipulate Montag
mercilessly.
In one of his most sympathetic moments, Beatty says he’s tried
to understand the universe and knows firsthand its melancholy tendency to make
people feel bestial and lonely. He is quick to stress that he prefers his life
of instant pleasure, but it is easy to get the impression that his vehemence
serves to deny his true feelings. His role as a character is complicated by the
fact that Bradbury uses him to do so much explication of the novel’s
background. In his shrewd observations of the world around him and his lack of
any attempt to prevent his own death, he becomes too sympathetic to function as
a pure villain.
Professor Faber
Named after a famous publisher, Faber competes with Beatty in
the struggle for Montag’s mind. His control over Montag may not be as complete and menacing as Beatty’s, but
he does manipulate Montag via his two-way radio to
accomplish the things his cowardice has prevented him from doing himself,
acting as the brain directing Montag’s body. Faber’s
role and motivations are complex: at times he tries to
help Montag think independently and at other times he
tries to dominate him. Similarly, he can be cowardly and heroic by turns.
Neither Faber nor Beatty can articulate his beliefs in a completely convincing
way, despite the fact that their pupil is naive and credulous.
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Themes, Symbols,
and Motifs
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Themes
Censorship
Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t provide a
single, clear explanation of why books are banned in the future. Instead, it
suggests that many different factors could combine to create this result. These
factors can be broken into two groups: factors that lead to a general lack of
interest in reading and factors that make people actively hostile toward books.
The novel doesn’t clearly distinguish these two developments. Apparently, they
simply support one another
The first group of factors includes the popularity of competing
forms of entertainment such as television and radio. More broadly, Bradbury
thinks that the presence of fast cars, loud music, and advertisements creates a
lifestyle with too much stimulation in which no one has the time to
concentrate. Also, the huge mass of published material is too overwhelming to
think about, leading to a society that reads condensed books (which were very
popular at the time Bradbury was writing) rather than the real thing.
The second group of factors, those that make people hostile
toward books, involves envy. People don’t like to feel inferior to those who
have read more than they have. But the novel implies that the most important
factor leading to censorship is the objections of special-interest groups and
“minorities” to things in books that offend them. Bradbury is careful to
refrain from referring specifically to racial minorities—Beatty mentions dog
lovers and cat lovers, for instance. The reader can only try to infer which
special-interest groups he really has in mind. As the Afterword
to Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates, Bradbury is
extremely sensitive to any attempts to restrict his free speech; for instance,
he objects strongly to letters he has received suggesting that he revise his
treatment of female or black characters. He sees such interventions as
essentially hostile and intolerant—as the first step on the road to book
burning.
Knowledge
versus Ignorance
Montag, Faber, and Beatty’s struggle revolves
around the tension between knowledge and ignorance. The fireman’s duty is to
destroy knowledge and promote ignorance in order to equalize the population and
promote sameness. Montag’s encounters with Clarisse,
the old woman, and Faber ignite in him the spark of doubt about this approach.
His resultant search for knowledge destroys the unquestioning ignorance he used
to share with nearly everyone else, and he battles the basic beliefs of his
society.
Motifs
Paradoxes
In the beginning of “The Hearth and the Salamander,” Montag’s bedroom is described first as
“not empty” and then as “indeed empty,” because Mildred is physically there,
but her thoughts and feelings are elsewhere. Bradbury’s repeated use of
such paradoxical statements—especially that a character or thing is dead and alive or there and
not there—is frequently applied to Mildred, suggesting her empty, half-alive
condition. Bradbury also uses these paradoxical statements to describe the
“Electric-Eyed Snake” stomach pump and, later, the Mechanical Hound. These paradoxes
question the reality of beings that are apparently living but spiritually dead.
Ultimately, Mildred and the rest of her society seem to be not much more than
machines, thinking only what they are told to think. The culture of Fahrenheit 451 is a culture of insubstantiality
and unreality, and Montag desperately seeks more
substantial truths in the books he hoards.
Animal and
Nature Imagery
Animal and nature imagery pervades the novel. Nature is
presented as a force of innocence and truth, beginning with Clarisse’s
adolescent, reverent love for nature. She convinces Montag
to taste the rain, and the experience changes him irrevocably. His escape from
the city into the country is a revelation to him, showing him the enlightening
power of unspoiled nature. Much of the novel’s animal imagery is ironic.
Although this society is obsessed with technology and ignores nature, many
frightening mechanical devices are modeled after or named for animals, such as
the Electric-Eyed Snake machine and the Mechanical Hound.
Religion
Fahrenheit 451 contains a number
of religious references. Mildred’s friends remind Montag
of icons he once saw in a church and did not understand. The language Bradbury
uses to describe the enameled, painted features of the artifacts Montag saw is similar to the language he uses to describe
the firemen’s permanent smiles. Faber invokes the Christian value of
forgiveness: after Montag turns against society,
Faber reminds him that since he was once one of the faithful, he should
demonstrate pity rather than fury. The narrative also contains references to
the miracle at Canaa, where Christ transformed water
into wine. Faber describes himself as water and Montag
as fire, asserting that the merging of the two will produce wine. In the
biblical story, Jesus Christ’s transformation of water into wine was one of the
miracles that proved his identity and instilled faith in his role as the
savior. Montag longs to confirm his own identity
through a similar self-transformation.
The references to fire are more complex. In the Christian
tradition, fire has several meanings: from the pagan blaze in which the golden
calf was made to Moses’ burning bush, it symbolizes both blatant heresy and
divine presence. Fire in Fahrenheit 451
also possesses contradictory meanings. At the beginning it is the vehicle of a
restrictive society, but Montag turns it upon his
oppressor, using it to burn Beatty and win his freedom.
Finally, Bradbury uses language and imagery from the Bible to
resolve the novel. In the last pages, as Montag and
Granger’s group walk upriver to find survivors after the bombing of the city, Montag knows they will eventually talk, and he tries to
remember appropriate passages from the Bible. He brings to mind Ecclesiastes 3:1, “To everything there is a season,” and also
Revelations 22:2, “And on either
side of the river was there a tree of life . . . and the leaves of the
tree were for the healing of the nations,” which he decides to save for when
they reach the city. The verse from Revelations also speaks of the holy city of
Symbols
Blood
Blood appears throughout the novel as a symbol of a human
being’s repressed soul or primal, instinctive self. Montag
often “feels” his most revolutionary thoughts welling and circulating in his
blood. Mildred, whose primal self has been irretrievably lost, remains
unchanged when her poisoned blood is replaced with fresh, mechanically
administered blood by the Electric-Eyed Snake machine. The symbol of blood is
intimately related to the Snake machine. Bradbury uses the electronic device to
reveal Mildred’s corrupted insides and the thick sediment of delusion, misery,
and self-hatred within her. The Snake has explored “the layer upon layer of
night and stone and stagnant spring water,” but its replacement of her blood
could not rejuvenate her soul. Her poisoned, replaceable blood signifies the
empty lifelessness of Mildred and the countless others like her.
“The Hearth
and the Salamander”
Bradbury uses this conjunction of images as the title of the
first part of Fahrenheit 451. The hearth,
or fireplace, is a traditional symbol of the home; the salamander is one of the
official symbols of the firemen, as well as the name they give to their fire
trucks. Both of these symbols have to do with fire, the dominant image of Montag’s life—the hearth because it contains the fire that
heats a home, and the salamander because of ancient beliefs that it lives in
fire and is unaffected by flames.
“The Sieve
and the Sand”
The title of the second part of Fahrenheit
451, “The Sieve and the Sand,” is taken from Montag’s
childhood memory of trying to fill a sieve with sand on the beach to get a dime
from a mischievous cousin and crying at the futility of the task. He compares
this memory to his attempt to read the whole Bible as quickly as possible on
the subway in the hope that, if he reads fast enough, some of the material will
stay in his memory.
Simply put, the sand is a symbol of the tangible truth Montag seeks, and the sieve the human mind seeking a truth
that remains elusive and, the metaphor suggests, impossible to grasp in any
permanent way.
The
After the bombing of the city, Granger compares mankind to a
phoenix that burns itself up and then rises out of its ashes over and over
again. Man’s advantage is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake,
so that eventually he will learn not to make that mistake anymore. Remembering
the mistakes of the past is the task Granger and his group
have set for themselves. They believe that individuals are not as
important as the collective mass of culture and history. The symbol of the
phoenix’s rebirth refers not only to the cyclical nature of history and the
collective rebirth of humankind but also to Montag’s
spiritual resurrection.
Mirrors
At the very end of the novel, Granger says they must build a
mirror factory to take a long look at themselves; this remark recalls Montag’s description of Clarisse as a mirror in “The Hearth
and the Salamander.” Mirrors here are symbols of self-understanding, of seeing
oneself clearly.