Fahrenheit 451 Character Development Essay

A dynamic character is defined as a character who undergoes an important change in their personality or attitude. The great protagonists in literature often go through an intense internal conflict, resulting in the character being perplexed as to which path is the right one to follow. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury follows a protagonist, Guy Montag, as he struggles with the choice between carrying on living in a brainwashed society or developing his own perspective on life, thus contributing to the theme of knowledge overpowering ignorance.

The novel begins with Montag as the destroyer of books, a man in love with the smell of kerosene and the satisfaction of spending his long day at work starting fires (Bradbury 3). The first part of the book is entitled, “The Hearth and the

A defining moment in Montag’s character development occurs when he steals a book from the home of a woman who would rather burn with her books than leave. Not only does Montag add a new book to his own collection, he feels genuine remorse for the woman who clung to her books until the moment she died (Bradbury 37). His curiosity naturally peaked and he began wondering what on earth books contained that made them worth dying for. After that moment, Montag tries in vain to read several books in a single day. While trying to understand what exactly the books hold, Montag turned to a professor name Faber. Faber gives Monag his insight and it wasn’t at all what he expected. Faber says, “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical about them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe into one garment for us” (Bradbury 83). Faber then goes on to explain the three things that are missing; quality, leisure, and the right to carry out decisions based on