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Written By Ray Bradbury "Guy Montag enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years and he had never questioned the joy of the midnight runs, or the joy of watching pages consumed by flames. Never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid. Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think. Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do. Guy Montag was not the same person at both the beginning and end of Fahrenheit 451.
The answer to this question is a definite no. Montag transformed dramatically throughout the story. Guy Montag is a fireman in charge of burning books in a grim, futuristic United States. The book opens with a brief description of the pleasure he experiences while on the job one evening. He wears a helmet emblazoned with the numeral 451 (the temperature at which paper burns), a black uniform with a salamander on the arm, and a "phoenix disc" on his chest. On his way home from the fire station, he feels a sense of nervous anticipation.
After suspecting a lingering nearby presence, he meets his new neighbor, an inquisitive and unusual seventeen-year-old named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately recognizes him as a fireman and seems fascinated by him and his uniform. She explains that she is "crazy" and proceeds to suggest that the original duty of firemen was to extinguish fires rather than to light them. She asks him about his job and tells him that she comes from a strange family that does such peculiar things as talk to each other and walk places being a pedestrian, like reading, is against the law. Clarisse's strangeness makes Guy nervous, and he laughs repeatedly and involuntarily.
She reminds him in different ways of candlelight, a clock, and a mirror. He cannot help feeling somehow attracted to her: she fascinates him with her outrageous questions, unorthodox lifestyle, perceptive observations, and "incredible power of identification. " She asks him if he is happy and then disappears into her house. Pondering the absurd question, he enters his house and muses about this enigmatic stranger and her comprehension of his "innermost trembling thought. Montag is disturbed by his meeting with Clarisse because he is not used to talking with people about personal subjects. Upon returning home, he realizes that he is not happy after all, that his appearance of happiness up to this point has been a pretense. He continues to experience feelings of foreboding.
He finds his wife, Mildred, in bed listening to earplug radios called "Seashells, " just as he has found her every night for the past two years. By her bed, he accidentally kicks an empty bottle of sleeping pills and calls the hospital just as a sonic boom from a squadron of jet bombers shakes the house. Two cynical hospital workers arrive with a machine that pumps Mildred's stomach (Montag later refers to the device as the "Snake") and another that replaces all her poisoned blood with fresh blood. Montag goes outside and listens to the laughter and the voices coming from the brightly lit McClellan house.
Montag goes inside again and considers all that has happened to him that night. He feels terribly disoriented as he takes a sleep lozenge and dozes off. The next day, Mildred remembers nothing about her attempted suicide and denies it when Montag tries to tell her about it. She insists on explaining the plot of the television parlor "family" programs that she watches endlessly on three full-wall screens. Uninterested in her shallow entertainments, Montag leaves for work and finds Clarisse outside walking in the rain, catching raindrops in her mouth-she compares the taste to wine. She rubs a dandelion under her chin and claims that if the pollen rubs off on her, it means she is in love.
She rubs it under Montag's chin, but no pollen rubs off, to his embarrassment. She asks him why he chose to be a fireman and says he is unlike the others she has met, who will not talk to her or listen to what she says to them. He tells her to go along to her appointment with her psychiatrist, whom the authorities force her to see due to her supposed lack of "sociability" and her dangerous inclination toward independent thought. After she is gone, he tilts his head back and catches the rain in his mouth for a few moments. Montag reaches down to touch the Mechanical Hound in the fire station, and it growls at him and threatens him. Montag tells Captain Beatty what happened and suggests that someone may have set the Hound to react to him like that, since it has threatened him twice before.
Montag wonders aloud what the Hound thinks about and pities it when Beatty replies that it thinks only what they tell it to think, of hunting and killing and so forth. The other firemen tease Montag about the Hound, and one tells him about a fireman in Seattle who committed suicide by setting a Hound to his own chemical complex. Beatty assures him no one would have done that to Montag and promises to have the Hound checked out. Over the next week, Montag sees Clarisse outside and talks with her every day.
She asks him why he never had any children and tells him that she has stopped going to school because it was mindless and routine. On the eighth day, he does not see Clarisse. He starts to turn back to look for her, but his train arrives and he heads for work. At the firehouse, he asks Beatty what happened to the man whose library they burned the week before.
Beatty says he was taken to the insane asylum. Montag wonders aloud what it would have been like to have been in the man's place and almost reveals that he looked at the first line of a book of fairy tales in the library before they burned it. He asks if firemen ever prevented fires, and two other firemen take out their rule books and show him where it says the Firemen of America were established in 1790 by Benjamin Franklin to burn English-influenced books. Then the alarm sounds, and they head off to a decayed, old house with books hidden in its attic. They push aside an old woman to get to them. A book falls into Montag's hand, and without thinking he hides it beneath his coat.
Even after they spray the books with kerosene, the woman refuses to go. Beatty starts to light the fire anyway, but Montag protests and tries to persuade her to leave. She still refuses, and as soon as Montag exits, she strikes a match herself and the house goes up in flames with her in it. The firemen are strangely quiet as they ride back to the station afterward.
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Research essay sample on Guy Montag Seventeen Year
