The Metamorphosis of Guy Montag
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Ray Bradbury originally wrote his novel, Fahrenheit 451, as an indictment against the censorship evident during the McCarthy era of America, and it has since become one of the few modern science fiction books that can be considered a classic. The adulation of this novel is due to its plethora of symbols, metaphors, and character development. Bradburys character development is singularly impressive in this book because he shows the evolution of the main character, Guy Montag, “from book-burner to living-book” (Johnson 111). His maturity is displayed by his growing understanding of the world in which he lives and by seeing the flaws in his society. Bradbury illustrates Montags metamorphosis with him changing from a mindless burning drone to his maturation and acceptance into a society of like-minded booklovers.
The first words of Bradburys novel state, “it was a pleasure to burn” (Bradbury 3). These words sum up the beginning character of Montag; he enjoys burning, and his job is to “answer alarms not to put out fires, but to start them (Moore 103). Guy Montag is a fireman, a man who is trained to spray kerosene on books, and light them in a spectacular show. He has never questioned his job or the reasoning behind burning books. He takes pride in his position, even shines his “beetle-colored helmet” as he hangs it on its hook (Bradbury 4). With fire Montag “bring[s] down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history”, and he revels in the power of destruction that fire holds (Bradbury 3). His only view of fire is a product of his job as a fireman; he sees fire as a machine, which simply burns and devours the freedom of the people. In this period of his life, Montag feels comfortable with machine, especially the machines that produce fire. He sees nothing wrong when his wife lip-reads his words instead of listening to him speak. When Montag first meets his young neighbor, Clarisse, he thinks of her in a mechanical mindset (Johnson 111). He sees them walking, as if “fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry [them] forward” (Bradbury 5). Hence, Montag feels comfortable around the soulless technology of his society; he loves to burn and to destroy, and he cannot think about the morals that surround his job and his culture.
Montag is first pushed towards rejecting his society when he meets Clarisse. She is brave enough to question society and in doing so causes Montag to question the morals of his civilization. Clarisse is the one who “represents those imaginative values that [Montag] lacks and which he must acquire” and she “awakens in him the desire to read” (Touponce 126-8). Montags first reaction is to laugh off Clarisses questions; he seems uneasy with the thought of reading. His emotions and laughing reaction reveal his nervousness around a young girl, who can so easily challenge the values that he has followed all his life. Clarisse is also important because she awakens Montag to the natural world. She asks him if he knew there was a man on the moon, or if he knew what it means when a dandelion rubs off on a chin. Clarisse is the one who introduces Bradburys theme that “[n]ature is good and technology is bad” (Huntington 113). Clarisse lets Montag experience freedom from his society because “[t]he novel expresses this vision of freedom with images of sentimentalized nature” (Huntington 112). She leaves him feeling that something in Montags world has changed, that “[h]e was not happy[h]e wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the mask” (Bradbury 12). Montag can no longer accept the world the way it is, and thus, either he, or it, must change. He then comes home to his wife, Mildred, to find her near death from a suicide attempt. Montag watches as two employees use a sinister machine to purge his wife of the poison. Montag sees the machine as “black cobra”, and he wonders if “it suck[s] out all the poisons accumulated with the years” (Bradbury 14). Thus, Montag is beginning to view machines as inhuman and unnatural. Mildred is a foil to Clarisses character; she represents the self-absorbed nature of her world, while Clarisse not only represents, but also is a living example of a natural, creative world. (Watt 41). Bradbury reinforces this contrast by causing Mildred to relate only to the subject of herself, while Clarisses favorite subject is other people. When Montag meets the Mechanical Hound, he discovers that it is a “dead beast, [a] living beast” (Bradbury 24). Donald Watt describes it as a “striking and sinister gadget” and it “is most terrifying for being both alive and not alive” (41; Huntington 113). The Hound becomes “Montags particular mechanical enemy[and it] becomes more suspicious of him” as time passes and Montag develops a greater freedom from his society (Johnson 112). Thus, Montag is thrust into the realization that his culture is not flawless, but instead is rife with abuses of human freedoms.
The final catalyst that convinces Montag that creativity is not to be destroyed is his last job as a fireman. He is taken to an old womans house, and he finds hundreds of books that “fell like slaughtered birds” when the “suddenly odious” firefighters walked among them (Bradbury 35-6). Montag feels the womans presence in the house; he feels her accusations, and he suddenly feels guilty about his actions. The firefighters pour kerosene on all the books, and when they are ready to set the blaze, the woman will refuses to leave her library. Instead she lights a match herself and sets the house ablaze; she, in effect, commits suicide in defense of her books. When he returns home, Montag cries because it is “[t]his action, while it horrifies Montag, also leads him to equate people with books and books with people” (Touponce 133). Her suicide “causes Montag to question what there is in books that is worth dying for and ultimately leads to his becoming a preserver of books instead of a destroyer” (Wood 148). Thus, the old woman that is willing to die for her books is the catalytic event that causes Montags discovery of the repressive nature of his society.
The next phase of Montags development shows his open rebellion and his flight from what he cannot change. Montag begins this stage with the realization that he does not know his wife. He thinks of his wife and discovers that he would not mourn her even if she died:
And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain that he wouldnt cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street