Characters
This fireman protagonist begins to question his job of burning books.
Guy Montag
This mechanical creature, armed with a poison needle, hunts down fugitives for the firemen.
Mechanical Hound
Montag and the other firemen do this to books, rather than putting out fires.
Burning Them
This author wrote Fahrenheit 451.
Ray Bradbury
This is the name of the giant screens Mildred watches obsessively and calls her 'family'.
Parlor Walls
Montag's wife, who overdoses on sleeping pills early in the novel and is obsessed with her wall-sized television 'family'.
Mildred Montag
The number 451 refers to this, according to the book's title.
The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns
This is how Clarisse McClellan is said to have died.
Struck by speeding car
Fahrenheit 451 was first published in this decade.
1950s (1953)
Montag's society discourages walking and slow thinking in favor of this kind of pace.
Speed / Constant Distraction
This free-spirited 17-year-old neighbor asks Montag 'Are you happy?' and awakens his doubts.
Clarisse McClellan
Montag hides stolen copies of these inside his air-conditioning vent.
Books
Rather than let firemen burn her house and books, this woman chooses to strike a match herself.
Unnamed old woman
Bradbury reportedly wrote much of the novel on a rented typewriter in the basement of this type of building.
a library (UCLA's Powell Library)
According to Beatty, minority groups objecting to content in books led to this practice becoming widespread.
Censorship
The fire captain who mentors and later confronts Montag, quoting literature even as he condemns it.
Captain Beatty
This tiny two-way communication device, given to Montag by Faber, fits in his ear.
"green bullet" (Sea shell radio)
After killing Beatty, Montag flees the city and finds this group of exiled intellectuals along a set of railroad tracks.
The Book people - led by granger
This genre, focused on imagined future societies and technology's effect on humanity, classifies the novel.
Dystopian Science Fiction
Faber says books matter because of the quality of information in them plus this, the time and space to digest it.
Leisure (Time to think)
This former English professor secretly helps Montag and gives him a two-way radio earpiece.
Faber
This mythological bird, which burns and is reborn from its own ashes, symbolizes renewal at the novel's end.
Phoenix
This event destroys the city at the novel's climax, shortly after Montag escapes.
Atomic bomb / nuclear war
Bradbury said the novel was less about government censorship and more a warning about this technology's effect on reading and attention.
television (mass media)
At the novel's end, Granger compares humanity to this bird-like myth, suggesting society can rebuild after destruction.
the phoenix (cycle of destruction and rebirth)