Plot Summary

Guy Montag is a Fireman who

believes he is content in his job,

which consists of burning

books and the possessions of

book owners.

Clarisse McClellan, a

teenage girl and his

new neighbour,

challenges Montag’s

view of happiness.

Mildred, Montag’s wife,

spends her days

engrossed in the three

full walls of interactive

TV (“the family”).

Back at the Firestation station,

Montag is threatened by the

Mechanical Hound, a robotic

hunter that can be programmed

to track any scent.

Montag asks

Beatty if there

was a time when

Firemen

prevented fires,

instead of

starting them.

Montag is disturbed when an

elderly woman, whose

neighbour has turned her in,

refuses to leave her house as

they douse it with kerosene. She

lights a match herself and burns

along with the house.

Haunted by the vision of the

old woman's death, and by the

news of Clarisse's death,

Montag doesn't go to work the

next day.

Beatty visits him at home and delivers a long lecture on

the history of censorship, the development of mass

media, the dumbing down of culture, the rise of

instant gratification, and the role of Firemen as

society's "official censors, judges, and executors."

When Beatty leaves, Montag shows

Mildred twenty books, including a Bible,

that he's been hiding in the house. He feels

that their lives are falling apart and that the

world doesn't make sense, and hopes some

answers might be found in the books.

But reading is not easy when you

have so little practice. Montag,

however, remembers a retired

English professor named Faber

whom he met a year ago and who

might be able to help.

Faber is frightened of Montag

at first, but eventually agrees

to help Montag in a scheme to

undermine the Firemen. They

agree to communicate through

a tiny two-way radio placed in

Montag's ear.

Montag forces

Mildred’s friends to

listen to him read a

poem by Matthew

Arnold from one of

his secret books. They

leave, greatly upset.

Montag hands over a book

to Beatty and is apparently

forgiven. Suddenly, an

alarm comes in. The

Firemen rush to their truck

and head out to the address

given. It's Montag's house.

Mildred is the one who called in the alarm.

Beatty forces Montag to burn his house with

a Flamethrower, and then tells him he's under

arrest. Beatty also discovers the two-way radio

and says he'll trace it to its source, then taunts

Montag until Montag kills him with the

Flamethrower.

Now a fugitive and the object of a

massive, televised manhunt, Montag visits

Faber, then makes it to the river a few

steps ahead of the Mechanical Hound.

Along some abandoned

railroad tracks in the

countryside, Montag finds a

group of old men whom

Faber told him about—

outcasts from society who

were formerly academics and

theologians. They and others

like them have memorized

thousands of books and are

surviving on the margins of

society, waiting for a time

when the world becomes

interested in reading again.

Early the next

morning, enemy

bombers fly overhead

toward the city. The

war begins and ends

almost in an instant.

The city is reduced to

powder.

Montag mourns for

Mildred and their empty

life together. With Montag

leading, the group of men

head upriver toward the

city to help the survivors

rebuild amid the ashes.

KeyThemes

Censorship

~ stopping the transmission or publication of matter considered objectionable.

Censorship is not imposed from above, but has arisen from below. Intellectualism and anything that disrupts peoples’ enjoyment (by making them question, think, disagree, etc.) has been banned as a result. No one wants to upset anyone, especially ‘minorities’, and thus anything contentious or thought-provoking has been banned. Ultimately, this power is then given to the government to enforce on behalf of the public.

Mass media becomes a tool for censorship: television is designed to avoid provoking ideas (it is, quite literally, ‘mindless’ entertainment).

Censorship

"Bigger the population, the more

minorities…The bigger your market,

Montag, the less you handle

controversy, remember that!... Authors,

full of evil thoughts, lock up your

typewriters. They did."

"It's not books you need, it's some of

the things that once were it

books....The same infinite detail and

awareness could be projected through

radios and televisors, but are not."

"Burn all, burn

everything. Fire is

bright and fire is

clean."

It was a

pleasure to

burn.

Apathy

~ lack of interest in or concern for things, particularly those things that which is considered important.

Citizen are unconcern about death and war, people are absorbed in their own lives and are not concerned about other people. They are generally apathetic towards life and death, lack any strong connections with others and are emotionless even when dealing with people in danger. Again, mass media is a key force behind this aspect of society.

People are too absorbed in their own lives to care about others, including their family. As a result, their own lives become meaningless.

Apathy

"We are living in a time

when flowers are trying

to live on flowers, instead

of growing on good rain

and black loam."

"We have everything we need to be

happy, but we aren't happy. Something's

missing. I looked around. The only

thing I positively knew was gone was

the books I'd burned in ten or twelve

years. So I thought books might help."

"Those who don't build

must burn. It's as old as

history and juvenile

delinquents."

"They are so confident that they

will run on forever. But they won't

run on. They don't know that this

is all one huge big blazing meteor

that makes a pretty fire in space,

but that someday it'll have to hit."

Conformity

~ compliance in actions and behaviour with certain accepted social norms.

The society is built around conformity – acting the same as everyone else. People do not seek to be ‘better’ at anything than anyone else. Stripped of knowledge and interest, no one is a threat to anyone else.

Education is aimed at making everyone the same: to not question or think, and to instead just wait to be ‘filled’ with facts. Entertainment and mass media is aimed at preventing people from thinking and instead follow instructions.

Self improvement is intensely discouraged by both the government and society. Anything other than the norm is ‘antisocial’.

Conformity

"We never ask questions, or at least

most don't; they just run the answers

at you, bing bing bing, and us sitting

there for four more hours of film

teacher"

"I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix.

It's so strange. I'm very social indeed.

It all depends on what you mean by

social, doesn't it? Social to me means

talking to you about things like this."

"The important thing for you to remember,

Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys... We stand

against the small tide of those who want to make

everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and

thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold

steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and

drear philosophy drown our world."

"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and

equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made

equal. Each man the image of every other; then all

are happy, for there are no mountains to make

them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A

book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn

it. Take the shot from the weapon."

Ignorance

~ lacking both knowledge and the desire to acquire it.

There is tremendous tension between the ideas of knowledge and ignorance. Montag’s society is structured around the destruction of knowledge and the promotion of ignorance in order to achieve ‘sameness’ amongst all people. If everyone is the same, no one is better, and then everyone can be happy. As a result, free thought and the sharing of ideas has been abandoned by the vast majority of society, and a self-destructive pursuit of ‘happiness’ has taken its place.

The quest for knowledge and the asking of questions destroys ignorance. Ignorance is ultimately destructive, while the proponents of knowledge are able to learn from the past and keep moving forward.

Ignorance

"Speed up the film, Montag, quick... Uh! Bang! Smack!

Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-

digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a

headline!... Whirl man's mind around about so fast

under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters,

broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all

unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"

"the televisor is real. It is immediate,

it has dimension. It tells you what to

think and blast it in. It must be right.

It seems so right. It rushes you so

quickly to its own conclusion your

mind hasn't time to protest“

"Cramp them full of non-combustible

data, chock them so damn full of facts

they feel stuffed, but absolutely

brilliant with information."

"You're not like the others. I've seen a

few; I know. When I talk, you look at

me. When I said something about the

moon, you looked at the moon, last

night. The others would never do

that."

Technology

"But who has ever torn himself from the

claw that encloses you when you drop a seed

in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it

wishes! It is an environment as real as the

world. It becomes and is the truth. … I have

never been able to argue with a one-hundred-

piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three

dimensions, and I being in and part of those

incredible parlours."

“The mechanical

hound slept but did

not sleep, lived but did

not live in its gently

humming, gently

vibrating, softly

illuminated kennel

back in a dark corner

of the firehouse.”

“Did it drink of the

darkness? Did is suck out

all the poisons accumulated

with the years? It fed in

silence … The impersonal

operator of the machine

could…gaze into the soul

of the person whom he

was pumping out.

Pages 22 - 27 Pages 59 - 68 Pages 35 - 39

History

Captain Beatty provides a

detailed, explicit account of

the demise of books and the

danger that they pose to

society.

PAGES 71-81

Read this passage carefully. Annotate it in your books.

Make notes in your exercise book on the

following. Include BRIEF quotes within

your answers where possible.

1. What led to books becoming

banned?

2. What is the world like as a result of

no books?

3. How has the world changed as a

result of this?

4. Why did people become afraid of

books?

5. How are books now viewed

6. What is valued most in this world?