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Fahrenheit 451 Fire Analysis

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Fire in Our Eyes Fire. Fire can do many things: destroy, heat, cook. Not only can it do many things, it can also be an abstract concept. Just like it being able to do many things, there are many ways writers can use it as symbolism. For Montag in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, fire is destruction; fire is happiness but, he learns, fire is also for survival.
Firemen are there to come and save people when houses burn, right? Wrong! In Fahrenheit 451 the firemen are the ones who burn the house; it is the status quo. The firemen would not just go around burning houses to destroy them. They made sure there was one reason: books. Books were the quarry that they are always searching to burn. If the firemen did not burn the person’s house the only way to get out of it is for the owner to burn it. For example, “The woman’s hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her” (Bradbury 36-37). After this incident, Montag first starting thinking that the books might have something in them, something …show more content…
By destroying other’s houses Montag found joy – at least for a while. After the lady burned her own house down and stayed inside, Montag started questioning if he still wanted to follow society or not. Was something in the books? Could they tell him something? Montag went so far as to break the law and, from a book of poetry, he read to his wife’s friends. The emotion that come off from them also shows something is in the books. “Mrs. Phelps was crying…She sobbed uncontrollably. Montag himself was stunned and shaken” (Bradbury 97). If Mrs. Phelps, someone who knew nothing about books and believed they were wrong, was so emotional from one, then there had to of been something in them. Although by now he figured out books were burned to keep ordinary people from getting smarter than the government, he did not agree with the government being so

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