Knowledge in Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In today’s society people react to what is going on around them in many different ways. Some decide that they do not know enough and decide to learn more. Others either think that they know enough or they just do not care. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 two of the main characters demonstrate these traits. Bradbury uses the people and symbols to convey his message: that if people do not start to cherish their freedom on knowledge, they will lose it. Bradbury also uses the overabundance of technology to show how people’s understanding of the way the world works deteriorates. Through the characters Guy Montag and his wife Mildred Montag, Bradbury demonstrates the will, and lack thereof, to learn, the effect society and technology has on them, and how the two of them respond to the knowledge and insight of books when given the opportunity.
Guy Montag, usually referred to as “Montag,” is a third generation fireman in the world of Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury 42). His world is a place where firemen start fires rather than putting them out; until the start of the book he does not question anything he is told (Bradbury 15). Montag goes through a series of events that cause him to doubt what he has always known. He learns that not all people are what his society finds normal, and when a woman is burned alive he feels that he needs to know more about what these books are all about (Bradbury 16, 35). As these events unfold before him, Guy becomes more and more intrigued with the books. He becomes so intrigued that he steals a book from the woman’s house before they burn it, which is later revealed that he has been doing for a while (Bradbury 34, 53). Throughout all this Montag finds that he is quite unhappy with his life, but he does not kn...

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...o lose their perception of the world, but also if they did happen to get that far away from their knowledge then their society and humanity as they knew it would cease to exist.

Works Cited
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