Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most misunderstood characters in this novel. He seems like he is the bad guy throughout the story up until his death. Beatty says this particular quote to Montag, which leads to a deep confession that has come out. “Any man who can take a tv wall apart and put it back together again is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just wont be measured or equated without making the man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it” (58). This quote is among one of the most important from the book because here the reader can infer that Beatty too has read and analyzed books.
One can consider Beatty to be a person who seems to be too smart to be a fireman who “hates” books. Throughout the story, Beatty pokes at the fact that Montag is changing and fires back with his high intellectual thoughts about feeling and emotion coming from Montag. Beatty makes the lengthiest and talks the most throughout the story and all of which ridicule books and who they are bad for everyone. “If you don’t want a man unhappy poetically, don’t give him one. Better yet, give him non. Let him forget there is such thing as war (58). This quote is Beatty ranting on against people having the ability to think at all. Beatty is explaining how burning books also burns any choice that people are left to make. He feels that society and all its people are better off when there is no choice to make, regardless the situation. Beatty is under the impression that people are indeed happier when there is no decision making.
The reader can assume that Beatty seems to be wishing he could forget his previous life and live happily like everyone else. He is not content. He does...
... middle of paper ...
...rmed from having books. When Montag has the torch in his hand, Beatty looks at the flame torch and knew what was coming next. Beatty knew that all Montag was thinking was murder, he begins to recite Shakespeare, “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats, for I am armed so strong in honesty that they pass me as a idle wind, which I respect not!” after this quote Beatty begins to directly order Montag, “Go ahead now, you second hand litterateur, pull the trigger” (113). Beatty wants Montag to murder him because he will die a “cause worthy” death like a noble character from a book might die.
For these reasons, I believe that Beatty is a very misunderstood character and is stronger that Montag. Beatty was doing what he thought best for society and saw various meanings of life in several ways. Beatty should not be labeled at a bad guy of any sort, much more a hero.
The villain in question is Beatty, this man is the head of the fire squad that Guy Montag the main characters is a part of. This man is quite brilliant, but he is obedient to the government and tries to persuade Guy to conform to the norm and not to break procedure by burning the books that he kept. We as the reader see Beatty as the enemy trying to stop Montag from making a change in the status quo. Beatty, though that the government was right and he followed it with extreme faith and commitment, he didn’t want Guy to ruin this “utopia” that he was living in. Beatty tries to stop Guy peacefully by persuading him by saying "At least once in his career, every fireman gets an itch. What do the books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh? Well, Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing!" page
Once Montag witnesses the unethical extent that the firemen would go through to destroy the existence of books, he realizes how corrupt and unjust the societal rules were. “He looked with dismay at the floor. ‘We burned an old woman with her books” (47).
In the end of the book we learn that the city Montag once lived in has been destroyed. It’s here where we get the end result of Montag, the man who once took special pleasure in destroying books now takes pleasure in preserving them. If not for Clarisse who opened his eyes to the truth through questioning life, or Faber who revealed the truth and magic in the books, and Granger who taught Montag how to preserve the books Montag could have very well been a victim of his cities destruction. It’s clear that Montag was heavily influenced by these three Individuals changing him from a once law abiding citizen of the futuristic government to a refugee of the law discovering reasons worth fighting for regardless of outcome.
First Montag changes from his conversation with Beatty (the fireman captain) and burning books and why they do it when he say the woman willingly have herself burn. The support is ¨You, weren't there, you didn't see¨ he said. here must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there. and you don't stay for nothing.¨ (Bradbury pg51) For example this is how the parts of text from the book because of the impact it creates on Montag into changing his view on literature. The reason behind this conversation is the fact that they burn books for a job and someone sacrificed their life for books willingly and then makes Montag questions books.
Montag throughout the novel faces situations and meets people who opens his eyes about society Montag is a fireman in the society; however, the job fireman takes on an entirely different meaning. Instead of stopping fires, Montag starts them. In the society literature is outlawed and it’s his job to burn the book along with the houses that held them.
Fahrenheit 451’s Relevance to Today Fahrenheit 451’s relevance to today can be very detailed and prophetic when we take a deep look into our American society. Although we are not living in a communist setting with extreme war waging on, we have gained technologies similar to the ones Bradbury spoke of in Fahrenheit 451 and a stubborn civilization that holds an absence of the little things we should enjoy. Bradbury sees the future of America as a dystopia, yet we still hold problematic issues without the title of disaster, as it is well hidden under our democracy today. Fahrenheit 451 is much like our world today, which includes television, the loss of free speech, and the loss of the education and use of books. Patai explains that Bradbury saw that people would soon be controlled by the television and saw it as the creators chance to “replace lived experience” (Patai 2).
“Behind his mask of conformity, Montag gradually undergoes a change of values. Montag realized his life had been meaningless without books” (Liukkonen). In the beginning of the novel, Montag said, “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed” (Bradbury 3). For most of his life, Montag conformed just like the other members of society. He set things on fire because it was his job and did not question whether or not it was the right thing to do. Throughout the story, however, he grew to find and voice his own opinions and resisted the conformity that his society stressed. When Montag had to decide whether or not to burn Beatty to death, he proved himself by not giving in to what was expected. He killed the captain of the police department, which was an entirely defiant act (Bradbury
The firemen had received a routine fire warning, and they creeped down their fire pole and crawled into the Salamander. When they reached their destined location an older woman was waiting for them. When the firemen located all the books and prepared to burn them, something out of the ordinary happened, the old woman sat in the middle of the pile of books and stared straight into the flame thrower. Montag begged the lady to leave but she insisted that she would not. With no time to waste, the flame thrower started up and sent the books up in flames with the poor old woman in the middle. Coincidently, just as Latimer and Ridley were burnt alive, the old woman was also burned alive as she sat there with her collection of illegal books and said, “Play the man Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” The old woman’s actions shows not only the readers, but also Montag and the other firemen that the books meant the world to her. Montag wonders what could have been so important about them. He was so curious that he grabbed a copy of the Bible from her house and hid it in his jacket to add to his own secret collection. It was following this event that Montag began to read the books he had hidden in his house in the ceiling vent. Also, the fact that Beatty was able to recite the quote
I believe that the characters Beatty and Mildred were catalysts for Montag’s awakening in Fahrenheit 451. Beatty was responsible for tempting Montag with the idea of reading books, and so he is the main reason that Montag grows a hunger of knowledge for themes and ideas of literature. Mildred is also a reason for the awakening of Montag, because she was his wife but had no emotional ties for him, so instead of having love from his wife he decided to search for love in other places resulting in a love of
Are you really happy? Or are you sad about something? Sad about life or money, or your job? Any of these things you can be sad of. Most likely you feel discontentment a few times a day and you still call yourself happy. These are the questions that Guy Montag asks himself in the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this book people are thinking they are happy with their lives. This is only because life is going so fast that they think they are but really there is things to be sad about. Montag has finally met Clarisse, the one person in his society that stops to smell the roses still. She is the one that gets him thinking about how his life really is sad and he was just moving too fast to see it. He realizes that he is sad about pretty much everything in his life and that the government tries to trick the people by listening to the parlor and the seashells. This is just to distract people from actual emotions. People are always in a hurry. They have 200 foot billboards for people driving because they are driving so fast that they need more time to see the advertisement. Now I am going to show you who are happy and not happy in the book and how our society today is also unhappy.
When Montag meets Clarisse, his neighbor, he starts to notice that there is more to life than burning books. Montag states, “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I have used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of those books” (Bradbury 49). It begins to bother Montag that all he has done for the past years is burn books. He starts to rethink his whole life, and how he has been living it. Montag goes on to say, “It took some men a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life and then I come along in two minutes and boom! It is all over” (Bradbury 49) Before, Montag never cares about what he has been doing to the books, but when he begins to ignore the distractions and really think about life he starts to notice that he has been destroying some other mans work. Montag begins to think more of the world
“Revealing the truth is like lighting a match. It can bring light or it can set your world on fire” (Sydney Rogers). In other words revealing the truth hurts and it can either solve things or it can make them much worse. This quote relates to Fahrenheit 451 because Montag was hiding a huge book stash, and once he revealed it to his wife, Mildred everything went downhill. Our relationships are complete opposites. There are many differences between Fahrenheit 451 and our society, they just have a different way of seeing life.
You take advantage of your life every day. Have you ever wondered why? You never really think about how much independence you have and how some of us treat books like they’re useless. What you don’t realize is that both of those things are the reason that we live in such a free society. If we didn’t have books and independence, we would treat death and many other important things as if it were no big deal. That is the whole point of Ray Bradbury writing this book.
In the book Fahrenheit 451 , Montag undergoes major character development. He started from a weak, dependant individual, who could at most think for himself. Throughout the book, he slowly found more and more flaws in the society he had blindly trusted. At the end of the book, Montag is a strong-minded, focused individual who is not afraid to stand up for his opinion, but cares for his life. Montag sacrificed everything in his life (including his life) to stand up for his opinions, which he could never have done in the beginning of the book. Everything Montag did had a reason and he changed because of those actions.
Beatty is the ideal antagonist for Fahrenheit 451 primarily because his great cruelty and abrasive personality starkly contrasts Montag’s more sensitive nature. Intimations of Beatty’s cruelty are made by the cruel games he plays with the other firemen at the station. The firemen own a mechanical dog (which has superb sense of smell and needle that injects its victims with paralyzing substances) that Beatty would take bets on the cruel games he pit the dog into. For example, Beatty would “set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats . . . to see which of the cats or chickens or rats the Hound would seize first” (...