Fahrenheit 451 221ideas he has always accepted. Although Montag
finds no easy answers to his questions, he does
develop a need to act upon his knowledge. He learns
that with understanding comes responsibility. Mon-
tag decides the best way he can honor his teachers
and the truths they have pointed him toward is to
protect knowledge from being lost. His education
leads him from the comfortable illusion of a fabri-
cated society to the harsher reality of nature found
in the wilds outside the city. No longer limited by
assumptions, and admitting his own lack of knowl-
edge, Guy Montag begins to see himself as part of a
larger process beyond the nightmare politics of the
only society he has ever known.
Mark D. Dunn
individual and sOciety in Fahrenheit 451
Individuality is dangerous in the world portrayed
in Fahrenheit 451. A totalitarian society, a system
wherein almost everything is controlled by the
government, demands that individuals conform to
the crowd. To stand out in this type of society is to
be targeted by forces that seek to control and limit
human potential. As Captain Beatty warns Montag,
“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and
equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made
equal.” Montag’s point (even though it is the Dec-
laration of Independence, not the Constitution, that
states all men are created equal) is that the idea of an
individual within society eats away at the uniformity
of the greater society.
In Fahrenheit 451, one method of protecting
society from the will of its individual members is
book burning—one of the most extreme manifesta-
tions of censorship. A state determined to exist as a
single political body must suppress divergent voices.
If one member of the whole acts independently,
the state will splinter into a society of individuals.
Therefore, totalitarian governments suppress the
qualities and ideas that make individuals unique.
The irony for Bradbury is that society as a whole
is made up of individuals, all pursuing their personal
goals while contributing to the common interest.
The ideal society will balance the rights of the indi-
vidual with the needs of the collective. By placing
his characters in such a stifling atmosphere, Brad-
bury shows the dangers of the potential imbalance.
Guy Montag finds himself at odds with his society.
Riding the subway one afternoon, he is unable to
remember the Sermon on the Mount, which he
has read recently. The train car is filled with an
advertisement for toothpaste. While the people on
the train sing along and stamp their feet with the
commercial, Montag explodes with rage. This scene
shows the individual rebelling against the demands
of a totalitarian society. Montag’s personality has
been suppressed to the degree that he erupts in
violent rebellion, shouting “Shut up, shut up, shut
up” to the crowded train car. The other passengers
think he has gone insane, but his action is only the
natural response of an individual who has repressed
his unique nature for too long a time.
Perhaps the best explanation of the individual’s
role in society comes to us from Reverend Padover,
an outcast who welcomes Montag into the new soci-
ety. The reverend was punished for writing a book
entitled The Fingers in the Glove; the Proper Relation-
ship between the Individual and Society. In this analogy,
the individual is an active part of the whole. It is the
individual who, ultimately, must take responsibility
for the actions of his or her society by challenging the
state should it go against the will of the people.
Mark D. Dunnsur vival in Fahrenheit 451
The theme of survival dominates much of Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The survival of Guy
Montag as he is pursued by the state functions as
the main plot and action in the novel. He runs from
the only community he has known and turns to the
world outside civilization for shelter. In the wilds
beyond the city, Montag is befriended by Granger
and his band of exiles. Granger greets Montag in a
strange way, saying, “Welcome back from the dead.”
Here we see the accepted reality of the technologi-
cal world revealed as illusion. It is to the wasteland
outside the city that Montag goes for survival and
where he finds community at last.
The journey of the novel’s protagonist points to a
deeper sort of survival. It is the survival of culture—
in the form of the written word—that concerns
Bradbury the most. By memorizing lost texts, Mon-
tag and his new friends carry the cultural wealth
of history into an uncertain future. Each survivor