After Montag has known Clarisse for a few weeks, she disappears. Mildred later tells Montag that Clarisse was run over and killed by a car and that her family moved away. Clarisse’s death could have been an accident by the joyriding teenagers she admitted to being scared of. However, readers might wonder if Clarisse was intentionally killed after Beatty taunts Montag about his friendship with Clarisse, saying, “Oh, no! You weren't fooled by that little idiot’s routine, now, were you? Flowers, butterflies, leaves, sunsets, oh, hell! It’s all in her file. I’ll be damned. I’ve hit the bull’s-eye. Look at that sick look on your face. A few grass blades and the quarters of the moon. What trash. What good did she ever do with all that?”
Mrs. Phelps likely cries when Montag reads aloud the poem “The Sea of Faith” because the poem tells of a dark, ignorant society that is similar to their own. Mrs. Phelps, like Mildred and Mrs. Bowles, has never actually reflected on how meaningless their lives are. To hear a poem that so plainly derides the way they live is enough to bring Mrs. Phelps to tears. Her tears may signal feelings of deep sorrow that her life is so empty, a resentment that she is feeling judged by Montag and/or the poem, or a combination of both emotions.
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Montag thinks Beatty wanted to die because even though Montag was armed with a flamethrower, Beatty “had just stood there, not trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, [and] needling.” Readers may infer that Beatty wanted to die because, like Mildred, he was likely deeply unhappy and didn’t value his life enough to even try to prevent Montag from killing him. Beatty may have even been less satisfied with life than Mildred because he was well-read, a fact supported by his quoting many works of literature to taunt Montag, and he understands what society has lost and how meaningless life has become now that books are illegal. Readers may also infer that Beatty’s continued taunting of Montag after Montag threatens to kill him with the flamethrower is a form of suicide: At that moment, “instead of shutting up and staying alive” he decides he wants to die and says what he needs to say to get Montag to pull the trigger.
The Mechanical Hound is a robotic animal that firemen can deploy to hunt and catch fugitives. It can be trained and programmed to hunt its prey very quickly by smell. Once it catches its prey, the Hound injects the person with a sedative; unable to run, the drugged fugitive is easily captured.
Before Montag meets Clarisse, he is described as having a “fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.” Like the other firemen, Montag’s greatest pleasure in life is burning books; he believes he’s happy with his job, marriage, and day-to-day routine. However, after Clarisse asks him if he is happy, Montag “felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself . . . [h]e was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs.” Clarisse awakens something inside of Montag that he didn’t know was there—a hunger, an emptiness, a longing for something real and meaningful. Montag grinned before he met Clarisse, but that early grin was an expression of ignorance and power, not an expression of true happiness.
The fact that a married couple who has been together for ten years can’t remember when or where they met shows the indifference to the past and to relationships that most people in this society have. Their society with its ban on books and emphasis on being constantly distracted seems to be designed to prevent relationships from deepening and holding more meaning than a superficial bond. In addition, Mildred is more concerned with being constantly entertained and keeping up with her “family” than thinking about her husband and her memories with him. When they try to remember their past together, Mildred avoids the stress and pain of the topic by stating, “It doesn’t matter” and then going into the bathroom to swallow several pills. It is only when Montag sees the city destroyed and he pictures Mildred’s death that he remembers they met in Chicago.
Montag says he feels like he’s “putting on weight” when he becomes curious about reading books. He can’t quite articulate what is happening to him but later reveals to Faber that he “could feel it for a long time, [he] was saving something up,” and that he had this curiosity inside him even before he could admit it to himself. Montag remarks that it’s “a wonder it didn’t show on me, like fat.” His body somehow felt the hunger and weight of wanting more, needing what books had to offer before his mind could acknowledge and understand the meaning of such feelings.
The fact that most people in the novel, including Mildred and Montag, don’t want children is another example of the dearth of interpersonal relationships and the level of people’s vanity and self-centeredness. Mrs. Phelps describes children as “ruinous,” and Mrs. Bowles says she would only have her children by Caesarean section, claiming that a baby is not worth “going through all that agony.” Taking care of children would take away from the vapid activities with which people fill their days.
When Faber and Montag meet for the first time in the novel, Faber says he is a coward because he “saw the way things were going, a long time back” and yet he “said nothing.” Even though Faber privately rebels against the government by having books and creating his technology, he feels that he did not do enough to save society from its ruin. It is only because of Montag's influence that Faber finally finds the courage to truly rebel.
The amount of casual violence in the society in the novel shows how deeply unsatisfied people are with their lives, even if they think themselves to be happy. Clarisse tells Montag how many of her friends have been killed, by being either shot or hit by cars. Violence is the only outlet people feel they have to express their anger, frustration, and unhappiness.
After Mildred overdoses on sleeping pills and has her blood replaced, Montag notices how full of life she suddenly looks as opposed to how she looked before. However, he knows that this vivacious appearance is only on the surface and will soon disappear. Mildred’s shallowness and emptiness will eventually poison the fresh blood one way or another. Here, blood symbolizes a person’s true inner self; Mildred has been given a fresh start with new blood, but as she is empty, the benefits of the new blood will quickly fade.
When Montag first sees Faber at his house, he notices how pale the professor is. However, once Faber sees the book that Montag has brought with him, some life comes back into his face. The way Montag sees it, blood is a symbol of life and vitality, and Faber’s thirst for knowledge is what brings the blood back to his face and brain. Such a detail implies that knowledge and what we can learn from books are essential to being fully alive.
As Montag looks at the faces of women on the parlor walls, he is reminded of looking at statues in a church and wanting to understand their significance. To Montag, to fully appreciate and understand something, it needs to be real enough that he can practically feel that he is inhaling it into his bloodstream, symbolizing his desire to learn and absorb all he can. The parlor walls are a sort of religious place to Mildred and the people on them like the empty statues he once tried and failed to understand. This moment reveals how different Montag is from those around him; he wants to feel real and alive rather than like he is merely acting in or sleepwalking through a fantasy.
Once Montag escapes the Mechanical Hound and is safely in the river, he is finally able to slow down and take in the nature around him, perhaps for the first time. Here, both Montag’s blood flow and thoughts slow down. Such a connection shows that his blood flow symbolizes his inner state of mind. Once he can be on his own, away from technology and other people, he finally experiences some peace and can reflect upon his thoughts and past experiences.
After the city is destroyed, Montag considers where he and the group will go next, and he imagines how much there is to see and know in the world. Here, Montag’s thoughts reveal that seeing and learning things isn’t enough: He wants to ingest them, to merge with them, to make these new experiences and places a part of him, circulating in his bloodstream. Unlike Mildred, who was full of easily replaceable blood that she could only poison from the inside, Montag wishes his blood—his inner self—to be purified and strengthened by the outside world.
When Montag first meets Clarisse, he notes that she immediately recognizes that he is a fireman based on the symbols on his uniform. Salamanders were once believed to be unaffected by flames, which is why the firemen use them as a symbol. Firemen and salamanders are seen as having similar powers, yet soon after meeting Clarisse, Montag finds he can no longer withstand setting fires with the intent of destruction.
After Montag meets Clarisse for the first time, upon entering his house, he immediately notices how cold and yet stifling his home feels. Even though this scene appears in the section “The Hearth and the Salamander,” it is clear there is no hearth in Montag’s home. A hearth is a source of warmth and comfort in a house, yet Montag feels nothing but the cold. The absence of a hearth here symbolizes the absence of love, connection, and true friendship in his marriage.
Moments before Montag makes this realization, he reflects on how Clarisse’s dandelion trick reveals that he is no longer in love with Mildred. Here, he considers how and why he and Mildred are so disconnected—there are literal walls between them. The parlor walls are giant screens that Mildred watches and talks to all day, every day. Rather than the parlor is a place for socializing and spending time with loved ones like a hearth is, it is actually what puts the most distance between Mildred and Montag. Unlike a hearth that gives off warmth and creates feelings of comfort, the parlor creates a coldness in Montag’s marriage and leaves him feeling powerless to connect with Mildred.
Here, Faber responds to Montag’s plan of planting books in the homes of firemen so that the firemen can see their own houses burn. The firemen, more than anyone else, think that they are safe from fire like a salamander, a belief expressed by the salamander symbol displayed on their uniforms. However, Montag wishes to teach them a lesson by proving they are not as indestructible as they think they are.
After Montag kills Beatty and the other firemen and destroys the Mechanical Hound, he considers the Salamander vehicle. Although the Salamander should be the easiest to destroy, it takes Montag a moment before he realizes he is capable of destroying it. The Salamander, a vehicle named for the creature believed to be impervious to fire, a vehicle that has symbolized so much destruction and oppression, will now finally be obliterated. At this moment, Montag accepts that nothing is safe from the attack of fire, not even the machines and people who once used fire as a weapon of oppression.
As Montag rides the subway on his way to see Faber, he recalls a trick that his cousin played on him by trying to get him to fill a sieve with sand, knowing that the sand would fall through the open spaces. As a child, Montag could see that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how fast he worked, the sieve wouldn’t fill with sand, and yet he kept trying. Montag’s childhood memory symbolizes his present situation: Despite his efforts, Montag feels that same frustration when trying to understand the truths of life.
While riding on the subway, reading a book, Montag tries his best to memorize every line of the text. He knows the book will be confiscated at some point, so he tries to read and memorize it as quickly as possible. However, as he learned as a child when trying to fill the sieve with sand, the more quickly he “pours” the information into his brain, the more quickly it passes through. The image of the sand falling through the sieve symbolizes Montag’s fruitless efforts to retain what he’s reading.
Here, Faber explains to Montag that the physical books themselves are not as important as the information they contain. Just as the sand will always sift out through the sieve, the human mind will always forget certain particles of information, no matter how hard it tries to remember. Books symbolize the remedy to stopping up the holes in the brain’s sieve as they ensure that information is held and always available for reference, never to be forgotten.
As Faber explains to Montag the three things that people need to be happy, he lists the first as “quality of information”—a detail readers could infer to mean that the information from books is of better quality than that relayed in the programs watched on parlor walls—and the second as leisure to digest the information they take in. Rather than try to consume the information as quickly as possible as Montag does on the subway, Faber believes people should take time to think about what they read and try to understand it, even challenge it, rather than simply accept it as the complete truth. Just as a sieve can’t be filled with sand no matter how quickly it is poured in, information can’t be processed by simply reading it and moving on.
As Montag runs from the Mechanical Hound after killing Beatty, he wishes he could return to his life from just a few days ago, connecting the change in his life to the analogy of the sieve and the sand. That moment on the subway, when Montag remembered the incident from his childhood and related it to trying to capture an intangible truth, is when he realized he could no longer exist in the world as it was. He knew he could not be happy around ignorant people such as Mildred when he longed to learn more about the world.
In addition to the salamander, the phoenix is a symbol that all firemen wear on their uniforms, with Captain Beatty also wearing the image on his hat. Similar to the salamander, the phoenix can withstand fire in its way—by being burned up and then reborn in the ashes. This is another ironic symbol for the firemen to display, especially Captain Beatty, as in the end, Montag kills him with fire.
When Beatty orders Montag to burn down his own house, Montag doesn’t hesitate, for he has come to despise all it represents. In truth, however, he doesn’t seek to destroy his house and everything in it but rather he wishes “to change everything.” He wants to forget the empty life he had with Mildred and create a clean slate for his future. Like the phoenix, he knows he needs to burn everything to the ground before he can rise and be reborn.
When Granger explains to Montag that the people in their group memorized certain books before burning them, Montag is surprised. However, rather than burning books to destroy the knowledge, they keep the knowledge and burn the books to protect themselves. Just as a phoenix cannot be destroyed by flames, the essence of literature can’t be destroyed by merely burning the pages: Wisdom and knowledge live on in those who have carefully read the text.
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