16. Fahrenheit 451

16. Fahrenheit 451 - by Ray Bradbury

In an America lulled into comfort by technology and loyalty, firemen are charged with burning books. It is a crime to have books, seen as instigators of inequality and the cause of much suffering. In the meantime the outside world is in trouble: war is a constant threat and eventually destroys the city with a single wave of bombs.

Guy Montag has always taken great pleasure in the fireman code. For him and his colleagues burning is a way to clean the past away using the python-like kerosene pipe to douse everything in flammable liquid and then watch it burn. Fire is a beautiful sight for neighbors, who are often spectators when a house goes up in flames. His wife Mildred is introduced by overdosing on sleeping medication. This nightly ritual of hers plays out while her seashell ear buds play harmonious tunes. Technicians, not doctors, come over to pump out her stomach with machines and reassure Montag’s concerns by telling him this is a common procedure. She remembers nothing the next day.

Clarisse McClennan, on the other hand, is a teenage girl with a wayward family featuring on the watch list of possible book hoarders. She questions the purpose of things – to her teachers’ dislike – and imagines how it used to be from her uncle’s stories. She introduces Guy to a new thinking in which books are fascinating and the status quo needn’t hold true.

The typical entertainment in the new cities is the parlor, which is filled with wall-sized screens that project the “family” and aimless shows. They are noisy, filled with bright, flashing lights and yet make the viewers feel a sort of empty euphoria that they crave when it is turned off. It is not okay to be sad or upset even though suicide is the single largest cause of death.

Guy, perhaps subconsciously, takes a bible belonging to a woman who is burnt with her collection of books rather than just leave them behind. His captain, Beatty, has no problem leaving this woman to her chosen fate, telling Montag that “they” end up committing suicide anyway. Beatty reminds Guy that any fireman who accidently took a book would be able to return it within a day without consequence, that it was natural to feel curious after doing the job for a number of years. However, this isn’t the first time for Montag. He has hidden dozens of books up in the ventilation of his home.

A man named Faber that Montag had met two years ago in the park also collects books and makes an ideal confidant when Mildred is aghast at his hoarding revelation. He retells how firemen came to have this destructive job and how he and others had not resisted when opinion had shifted against books and their ideas. He regrets terribly his cowardice and finds strength in Montag’s audaciousness.

Under Faber’s instruction and with an ear piece to communicate, Montag returns to the fire station to return the book and avoid further suspicion. The initial plan is to topple the system quietly from the inside. When the station responds to a call soon after he arrives, it turns out Mildred has spilled Montag’s secret stash and ratted him out. Montag is headed for prison and Beatty has him burn his own house down. This turns out to be a fatal mistake (or a suicidal intent?) when Montag turns the spewing python on Beatty and then on the Mechanical Hound that leaps at him with its procaine proboscis ready to anesthetize. The same hound which had haunted him earlier and tried to kill him. The hounds are programmed to attack only select people using tissue samples so the earlier attack is a constant source of paranoia for Guy.

The hunt is on for Montag who finds his way out of the city, averting the keen scent of another trailing hound, with Faber’s help and witnesses the destruction of everybody he has ever known in a whistling carpet of nuclear bombs. He and his new found companions, mostly professors, vow to make books available so that a new generation can learn from its mistakes.