The idea
It all starts with the story of a society of the utopian future in which books and reading are prohibited.
The State is almighty and strongly condemns those who find reading. It is a state where sensuality is imposed as the greatest expression of materialism, where public powers are in pursuit of all those who do not conform to their laws. Reading has been banned, and they can only watch television, which is the popular medium for entertainment and also serves to indoctrinate.
It is the true role model of stupidity. Its protagonist is designed in the best way, is called Montag, and is a firefighter whose function is to cause fires to burn the books that are found to the people they treat as degenerate. The world that develops in the book is one where there is no wisdom of literature, and in it, his characters will dare to let go of those chains of censorship and repression of the intellectual type.
History
The history of this novel is around the character of Guy Montag. This is a fireman whose mission is to burn books when the government orders him. One day he meets the young Clarisse McClellan, the teenage girl who lives next to her house, who teaches her to reflect on her own happiness. Full of confusion about whether books are good or not, he decides to steal one when they send him to burn a house. Several days later, Clarisse disappears.
Captain Beatty, head of Montag, begins to suspect that Montag is hiding books and begins to give him a long talk about their danger, what is the origin of their work and how is the society in which they live. When he leaves them, Guy decides to go home and begins to read the book he had taken. Then look for someone to help you and, above all, guide you in the themes of the books.
He recalled that a year before he had met a teacher, who knew a lot about books and handed him his address, he looked for her and went to his house and managed to talk to him, he gave him a headset to talk to him and asked him to go to the fire station. While there, he meets Beatty, who provokes him by telling him that he had dreamed that they were discussing books, but at that moment, the bell rings, and they must go to work. To Montag’s surprise, they go to his own house since his wife Mildred called and accused him of having books and then ran away.
When they burn Montag’s house, Beatty arrests him and finds him the handset and starts asking who he belongs to, Montag is enraged and burns Beatty with his flamethrower, but the mechanical hound throws himself at him and almost kills him, but Beatty manages to burn it and destroy it with your flamethrower. Montag flees to Faber, but another mechanical dog is looking for him, and the teacher tells him to go to the river since they won’t find him there.
There he meets other intellectuals and Granger and tells him that he has memorized a book, then the city is bombed, and they kill the entire population that was there, leaving Montag and the intellectuals to be able to rebuild a new society with more wisdom.
The plot of the work
The novel tells the story of Montag, a firefighter whose mission is to burn books, in an imagined and dystopian society (it is a perverse utopia where reality takes place in opposite terms to those of an ideal society) since, according to the government, reading prevents Be happy because full of anguish.
When reading, men begin to be different when they must be equal, which is the objective of the government, which ensures that citizens are happy so that they do not question their actions and citizens give up their work.
At the beginning of the novel, the country of Montag (United States) is on the verge of war. The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic injection, escorted by helicopters, is prepared to track dissidents who still keep and read books.
Characters
Guy Montag: he is a 30-year-old man, whose profession is to be a firefighter, but in the XXIV century, this work represents burning books and houses where texts are stored, since this represents an illegality in this new society of future. At the beginning of the novel, he practices his profession with excellence and pride in all the work of burning books and home and thinks he is a completely happy man.
Mildred Montag: Millie is also called as a nickname, she has been the wife of Guy Montag for 10 years, and is a woman who represents the superficiality and the way a society is pleased, which Montag is beginning to despise. She gave up her happiness to get into the world of technology: three-wall television and the snail radio, instruments that society uses for people to evade reality and follow the rules of society.
Captain Beatty: is the bad guy, the commander of the fire department where Montag works. Its only function is to discover where the people who hide books in their homes are, and burn them to end the seed of what is called “free thinking.” Its quality is high knowledge in literature, which demonstrates when looking for arguments so that the books do not have the people of the society where they live.
Professor Faber: Faber is a great intellectual, an older man, who has no place in the world of Fahrenheit 451. He does not approve of that society where humanity has been lost and where people are oppressed, but still believe that there is more security in living discreetly, than protesting manifestly to change the world. He and Montag meet a year earlier in a park, where they managed to talk a lot about books.
Granger: he is an intellectual and a writer who leads a group of tramps, with whom Montag is on a train track when he is fleeing the police and the mechanical hound dog. In the same way as Clarisse and Faber, this character has empathy with Montag, with which he can open his wings and encourage him to seek memories and understanding of what he has already read.