What Montag Learned in Fahrenheit 451

Simplicity vs. Reality

Above all things, Montag loved to burn. It was pleasurable for him to set aside his ignorance, watching as the little papery ashes shrivel up, and wisp into the air like fireflies. But that was before he took the time to ask why. Montag had to ask himself why he was burning these books, when he didn’t even know what they were. So he decided to take action and read them. Where he lives, this is illegal. Reading these books brought misfortune, like loosing his wife, house, and being forced to become a nomad. But he also benefited from this. By reading these books and ruining his life he also gained many things. A few of these are knowledge, feelings, and understanding.

Gaining this knowledge is the very thing that ruined his life, though it gave him a sense of meaning. Through all of this Montag learns the information he finds in the books was what he needed all along. The life he was living was a lie. He was an ant to his society, and it must have come as a relief to finally realize he was no longer being controlled by his lack of intelligence.

Throughout this story as I started to become more familiar with the characters I noticed something quite unusual. In essence, the people around Montag only have two basic feelings, happiness and sadness. All these people ever know is that they want to be happy and they don’t care at what cost. They don’t have any knowledge or understanding of the way things work and that’s exactly what their government wants for them, because as soon as you have knowledge and understanding you start having more in depth emotions and begin asking questions, which leads to trying to makes changes. This causes complication, and that’s just the sort of thing they cannot allow in their simple, ant-like society. Montag gets feeling from the books, and the feelings he gets motivates him to do what’s right. Even if everyone else around him is self centered, they only care about their own happiness.

In chapter One Clarisse asks Montag if he’s happy. She makes it seem like such an easy question, while in fact it’s one of the hardest questions he has ever had to ask himself. The truth is that Montag doesn’t understand what true happiness is. All he knows is that he needs to make some drastic changes, and Montag doesn’t even know how.