Rebirth Through Fire: Montag's Transformation in Fahrenheit 451

survive the fire goes to symbolize continuity, and so life after death. Moreover, Guy Montag, the main character, says to his ally Faber, “To see the firehouses burn across the land, destroyed as hotbeds of treason. The salamander devours his tail! Ho, God!” These words have a lot of meaning because of the new status occupied by Montag in the world. He is no longer a fireman who burns books and innocent people, but a new man fighting a personal war against those who violated the sacred duty that they were originally occupying in society. Now, he wants to hide books in the houses of all the firemen who cheated life by becoming the burners instead of being those who extinguished the flames. By doing so, the mechanical hound will detect the houses and have them burned to ashes. In Montag’s words, the salamander is going to bite its tail.

As a contradiction to life as we know it, the firemen do not use water from their trucks to extinguish fire, but operate a system in which liquid kerosene is sprayed over books and houses to set them to flames. Therefore, the figure of the firefighters takes an abominable significance. Then, Captain Beatty, livid with his anger and full of his beliefs, cries to the poor Mrs. Blake, “You know the law, where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!” (Bradbury, page 18). This sinister character blames books to not agree with each other, and blinded by what he thinks to be the right way of life, he uses the liquid kerosene to set fire to not only the books and the house in which Mrs. Blake lives, but to the woman as well. Perhaps, the liquid kerosene is a mean of destruction in strong contrast with water, which is naturally used to suffocate flames. Furthermore, when Montag says