Characters
A fireman who loves to burn, but starts questioning his own happiness after a brief friendship with the neighbor girl.
Who is Guy Montag?
Most of these are illegal in Fahrenheit 451, with the exception of things like manuals and comics. Montag risks it all just for a chance to see what they have to offer, even though he makes his living by burning them.
What are books?
These items symbolize different things to different characters. For the firefighters, they represent a threat to happiness. For Faber, they represent something precious that has been lost. For Montag and Granger, they represent hope for a better future.
What are books?
What is Animal Farm?
Who is Ray Bradbury?
A fireman's wife. She cares more about "family" in the parlor walls than her actual husband. She overdoses on sleeping pills in the beginning of the story.
Who is Mildred Montag?
Clarisse suggests firefighters used to put out fires, but this is ridiculous because every family lives in one of these.
What are fireproof houses?
This is the most prevalent symbol in the book, and it represents the destructive power of ignorance and fear. Montag uses this to make his living.
What is fire?
A short story where the digestive organs of pigs are grafted into human patients. The social, economic, and political pressures all mount at once as those patients begin showing troubling eating habits. This short story by Yan Martell is a great example of the dangers of runaway trends and the cycle of overreaction.
What is We Ate the Children Last?
The genre of fiction that Fahrenheit 451 is most often placed in.
What is dystopian fiction?
A fire chief who is shockingly well-read, given his profession. He believes firmly that burning books is crucial to maintaining happiness. He really enjoys giving nice, long talks to his employees.
Who is Captain Beatty?
Clarisse marvels at the length of these along the highway, since they had to be stretched out in order to be read at high speed.
What are billboards?
According to Clarisse, doing this will tell you if you are in love or not.
What is rubbing a dandelion on your chin?
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, a perfectly average neighborhood descends into paranoid chaos after a mysterious power outage. Based on a short story of the same name, this episode points to rampant anti-communist hysteria in 1960's America, and warns how our enemies do not need to be powerful enough destroy us if they can simply wait for us to destroy ourselves.
A man often credited with creating the fire department, though historians recognize that they actually existed well before he lived. Montag's fireman's manual lists him as their founder.
Who is Benjamin Franklin?
A sixteen-year old girl who surprises her neighbor with her friendliness and curiosity. Clearly influenced by her uncle, this character questions everything, and is especially interested in understanding "why." She disappears about one third of the way through the story, but her impact is lasting.
Who is Clarisse McClellan?
The Montags have three of these, which blare entertainment into a household at maximum size, brightness, and volume.
What are parlor walls?
In Part 2 of the novel, Montag compares trying to understand what he reads to this frustrating activity he was tricked into doing as a child while on the beach.
What is pouring sand into a sieve?
In this episode of "The Twilight Zone," a young woman is distressed as she's faced with surgery to transform her entire appearance, a rite of passage in her society. Everyone around her is beautiful, and she is plain by comparison, and her mother, uncle, friends, and doctors are all baffled as to why she isn't bothered by this. She fights to maintain her individuality, but loses out.
What is "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You"?
This character, who is only talked about in Fahrenheit 451, is a reference to a character in one of Ray Bradbury's other stories, a short story called "The Pedestrian."
Who is Clarisse's uncle?
A former college professor who has a chance meeting with Montag in the park. He calls himself a coward for not standing up for books when he had the chance, but he helps Montag out greatly.
Who is Faber?
These objects, which were fictional and futuristic when the book was written but are commonplace now, are referred to by several names throughout the book. These names are all symbolic of the shape and small size of the item.
What are earbuds?
This writing style had its hey-day as a fad in the first half of the 20th century, but it is often used in this book. In this style, a character's experience is written as one sensory input after another, strung together plainly and without analysis or comment. It is meant to simulate our real way of experiencing the world.
What is stream of consciousness?
We watch as a rural town performs an annual ritual of selection. The process is described in dry, routine language and without excitement on the part of the participants, until the very end when its terrible consequences are revealed.
What is "The Lottery"?
The decade in which Fahrenheit 451 was published.
What is the 1950's?