Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
Part I: The Hearth and the Salamander
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Guy Montag is having a good time setting things on fire. It’s his job. He’s a fireman, and
appropriately wearing a fireman’s hat with the number 451 engraved on the front.
Now, by “setting things on fire” what we mean is burning a house down. More info to come; stay
tuned.
Back at the fire station, Montag hangs up his gear and takes a shower. (Gleefully destroying
homes is dirty work.) He slides down the classic fireman pole and heads outside; it’s about
midnight.
He takes the subway to the station nearest his home and exits to the dark street, where he has the
same feeling he’s had for a few nights running: someone has just been there in the street.
The someone turns out to be a young woman, whom he discovers when he rounds the corner.
She’s very pale and has dark, shining brown eyes, and is staring at the “salamander” on his arm
and the “phoenix disc” on his chest, whatever that means. (These are simply the images depicted
on his uniform.)
Anyway, Montag asks the girl if she’s his new neighbor, which she is. She introduces herself as
Clarisse McClellan, but only after being spacey and weird about the fact that Montag is a fireman.
She asks to accompany him home, and Montag agrees.
As they walk along together, Montag, despite the perpetual aura of kerosene that hangs about his
person, smells strawberries and apricots in the air, which he knows is impossible this time of year.
Clarisse decides to dispense with the small talk and reveals that she is seventeen and crazy. Her
favorite activities include walking around and smelling things. And also looking at things, like the
sunrise. She then informs Montag that she’s not afraid of him.
Guy looks into her dark eyes and sees himself reflected. He senses a certain illumination in her
face. (We’re sorry, we can’t make this less cheesy for you.)
Clarisse wants to know how long Montag has been a fireman. Since he was twenty, he says, so
ten years ago. She asks if he’s read the books he burns; of course not, he answers, because that’s
illegal.
He then recites a little rhyming ditty in which different authors are burned on different days.
Clarisse wants to know if, long ago, firemen actually put out fires instead of starting them.
No, says Guy. (Dream-smasher!)
Clarisse laughs, is chastised by Guy for not showing respect, and without segue begins talking
about the cars that speed down the highway too quickly to see the world around them. (She has
time to think about things like that, she explains, because she doesn’t engage in normal, timewasting activities.)
We get the sense that the cars really are unreasonably speedy when Clarisse talks about the twohundred-long foot billboards. She discusses all the things people miss when they drive by so
quickly, like the fact that there’s dew on the grass in the morning.
Montag admits he hasn’t looked in a long time.
Clarisse explains that she lives with her mother, father, and Uncle. Her uncle is the rebel, it
seems. He’s the one who tells her about how things used to be. He also gets arrested occasionally
for such crimes as…being a pedestrian.
They’ve reached their respective houses and Montag says good night. Before they part, Clarisse
asks him if he’s happy, which he finds to be obnoxious. She’s gone before he can answer.
Once he enters his house, though, Montag can’t shake the question. Of course he’s happy!
Right…?
Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
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The whole encounter has left a bad taste in his mouth. It was all very strange, he reflects, like this
one time he ran into an equally odd old guy in the park. (Oh, subtle foreshadowing, where would
we be without you?)
He also can’t stop thinking about Clarisse’s face, which he finds to be very beautiful. It reminds
him of the face of a clock, illuminated in darkness, “all certainty and knowing.”
Then Montag yells at himself for being a moron and pondering such silly matters.
But back to her face. It seemed to him like a mirror, reflecting him when he looked in it. We get
into some blurry identity business here, where Montag can’t separate himself from Clarisse.
He also thinks it’s weird that she was just standing in the street like that in the middle of the night,
almost as if she were waiting for him…
Montag goes into his bedroom but doesn’t turn on the light. He’s not happy. He feels as though
he’s been wearing a mask, and this Clarisse girl took it and ran away.
Before he flicks the light switch, Guy stands around in the darkness and wonders what it will look
like when he turns on the light. He knows his wife will be lying on the bed, flat on her back, that
she’ll have little Seashells in her ears (headphones, we gather) listening to sounds and talk from
the radio.
Guy makes his way to his own bed (this is like a 1950s, Lucy and Ricky bedroom), but on the
way trips on a metal object. He sensed that he was going to trip before he did.
Rather than turning on the light, Guy simply flicks his lighter to illuminate the room. When he
sees his wife, Mildred, she’s pale and her breath is shallow. The object on the floor is a bottle of
sleeping pills, which used to have thirty capsules in it and now has zero.
As he stands there in shock, a series of jet bombers flies overhead, filling the sky with noise and
shaking the bedroom. When they’re gone, he grabs the phone and dials whatever is the messed-up
future-world version of 9-1-1.
Two guys show up to help with the emergency. They’re more like plumbers than doctors, much to
Guy’s dismay. They use two machines on his wife, one to suck out her stomach and the other to
clean her blood.
They’re rather callous and matter-of-fact, and ask Montag for the fifty dollar fee when they’re
done. When he asks why they didn’t send a medical doctor, the men respond that these cases
come ten a night, so they're pretty routine.
The handymen leave Montag alone with his still-sleeping wife. He ponders the immensity of the
universe and the melancholy of being alone in a world of strangers.
Montag goes to the window. It’s 2 a.m. He hears the sound of laughter coming from Clarisse’s
house. He walks over to their house and stands on the porch, listening to the words of a man he
guesses is Clarisse’s uncle. This is an age of disposability, the voice says, when human beings are
used and thrown away like napkins.
Guy moves back to his own house and falls asleep with the aid of a “sleep lozenge,” listening to
the sound of the rain and concluding, “I don’t know anything anymore.”
The next morning, Montag wakes up to find his wife Mildred making toast and completely
oblivious to last night’s fiasco, like that whole attempted suicide thing.
Instead, Mildred wants to talk about TV. Three walls of their parlour room are apparently made
up of large TV screens, which she watches endlessly.
In this world, TV is interactive. Mildred sent in enough box tops to get a script, and she’s meant
to stand in the middle of the room and read her part of the television show.
She also asks about getting a fourth TV wall put in, for 2,000 dollars. Guy responds that this is a
third of his yearly pay.
Montag, who has had enough of his insipid spouse, walks outside in the rain. He encounters
Clarisse, who is of course trying to catch the rain drops in her mouth.
Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
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She’s holding a dandelion and informs Guy that, if you rub the flower under your chin and your
chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love. According to this test, Clarisse is in love. Guy tries it;
he is not in love.
This makes him angry, probably because he’s married and being in love is sort of supposed to go
hand-in-hand with the rings.
Clarisse explains that she has to go see her psychiatrist now. “They” want to know why she
spends so much time thinking and playing around in nature instead of watching TV or engaging
in other, equally brainless activities.
Guy remarks that she seems so much older than his wife, even though Mildred is thirty and she’s
only seventeen.
Then she wants to know about how Montag got into his line of work. It’s strange, she thinks, for
someone as open-minded as Guy to be a fireman.
Guy feels his body divide into two halves, which is probably hyperbole-speak for “identity
crisis.” Clarisse heads out, and he stands around catching the rain in his mouth.
In the back of the firehouse lies the Mechanical Hound. It tracks its prey by sense of smell, which
can be programmed into its mechanical insides, and kills them by lethal injection via its
retractable four inch needle. When the firemen get bored, they program it to hunt down rats or
chickens. (Whatever happened to Monopoly?)
Guy touches the hound on the head and it starts growling, which freaks him out. He backs away
slowly until the hound closes its mechanical eyes again.
On the other side of the room, three of his coworkers and the Captain are all playing cards
together. Montag comments that the hound doesn’t like him, but the Captain counters that a
mechanical beast doesn’t have any such emotions.
It’s threatened him more than once, Montag replies. What if someone programmed it against him?
Secretly, he worries about what he has hidden behind the ventilator grill back home (more on this
later).
Captain Beatty makes a joke about Montag feeling guilty, which Montag does an all-around
horrible job of playing off casually.
Montag continues to see Clarisse every day; she always walks him to the corner of his street. He
comments that he feels as though he’s known her for years, and lest we start to think anything
sketchy is going on, he insists that she makes him feel like a father.
She wants to know why he doesn’t have any children himself, and Montag, embarrassed, explains
that his wife never wanted any.
They continue to chat. Clarisse explains that she doesn’t go to school and that they don’t miss her
there, since she’s very anti-social anyway. Most of the activities in school – watching TV, looking
at pictures, playing sports – don’t seem really social anyway (you never have real conversations
with people, she says), so in her opinion she’s not missing much.
Clarisse then reveals the staggering violence prevalent in her world. People are always hurting
each other, and six of her friends have been shot in the last year, never mind everyone that dies in
car wrecks.
So she occupies her day mostly by watching. She likes to ride the subway and listen and watch. In
doing so, Clarisse has discovered that no one talks about anything substantial. Even art is abstract,
though she’s heard that sometime in the past art actually showed you real people.
A week later, Clarisse is gone.
Playing cards at the firehouse one night, Montag listens to the news on the radio: war may break
out any moment, it reports.
Captain Beatty asks him what’s wrong, and Guy wonders if it’s guilt that he’s feeling.
Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
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He looks around the table at the other firemen and realizes that they all look exactly like he does:
dark hair, unshaven, sunburnt faces. Montag asks aloud what happened to the man last week,
whose library they “fixed.”
Beatty explains that he was taken off to an insane asylum, since “any man’s insane who thinks he
can fool the government and us.”
Montag looks to the typed lists of millions of forbidden books which adorn the walls of the
firehouse. Again he remembers the ventilator grille back home and is somehow soothed by it. He
begins to respond to Beatty by saying, “One upon a time,” but is interrupted – this is an odd thing
to say.
Montag realizes he made a mistake; at the last fire he glimpsed inside one of the books they were
burning and saw the line “once upon a time.”
So he re-words his question. Didn’t firemen used to put out fires, he asks, rather than start them?
The other firemen laugh and show him their rule books, which clearly establish that the
organization was started in 1790, in the colonies, by Benjamin Franklin. The rules themselves are
fairly simple and can be summed up as “Go. Burn. Come back.”
Meanwhile, the alarm goes off and the firemen all rush out of the station house.
They arrive at a three-story house and seize a woman who is by no means trying to escape.
Standing outside her house, she repeats the words which Hugh Latimer, a British clergyman,
spoke to his friend as they were both being burned as heretics: “Play the man, Master Ridley; we
shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
Beatty slaps the woman in the face and insists she tell him where “they” are. But he already
knows that the books are hidden in the attic, as reported by this woman’s neighbor.
As the firemen scurry into the house, Montag is irritated. He never minded burning books before
because they were only things, just objects unrelated to people.
Up in the attic, Montag attacks the books with his flamethrower. As one falls open, he reads a
single line: “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.” (This is from Scottish poet
Alexander Smith’s Dreamthorp, a collection of essays.)
Montag’s hand reaches out and takes the book, hiding it inside his jacket. Not Montag – Montag’s
hand. He believes it acted on its own.
Outside the burning house, its owner refuses to move. “You can’t have my books,” says the
woman. Then she pulls out a match and lights everything on fire, including herself. Meanwhile,
Montag wonders why the fire alarms always come at nighttime – maybe because fire is more
beautiful against the night sky.
On the way back to the firehouse, Beatty is able to repeat, word for word, what the woman quoted
from Hugh Latimer, and explain its historical source.
The firemen are so surprised that they drive right by the firehouse.
At home, Mildred asks annoying questions which Montag ignores while still blaming his hand for
all his earlier actions. He hides his book under his pillow.
He climbs into bed and cries himself to sleep.
Montag wakes up in the middle of the night and sees his wife in her own bed on the other side of
the room, with the “Seashell” audio device in her ear. He wonders if the best way to talk to her
might be a similar device, where he could whisper to her while she’s sleeping. But he doesn’t
know what he would say anyway.
Finally he wakes her up and asks if she remembers how they met; she doesn’t, even though it was
only ten years ago.
Montag wonders if she would cry, were he to die. Probably not. He remembers the dandelion
which reported his lack of love.
He feels there’s a wall between him and his wife, much like the three TV walls in the parlour. She
thinks of the fictional characters as her family.
Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
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Guy reflects on the loud, overwhelming sounds that come from the TV room when Mildred is in
there watching.
Still in bed, Guy asks Mildred if she’s seen the girl next door, Clarisse, since she disappeared four
days ago. Mildred thinks she’s dead and that her family has moved away. Montag falls asleep
with thoughts of the Mechanical Hound.
The next morning Guy is sick and asks his wife for aspirin, and to turn off the noisy screens in the
parlour room. She doesn’t want to, since that’s her family.
He tries to tell her about what happened last night – the woman they burned with all her books –
but Mildred doesn’t care and just keeps talking about her TV shows.
Guy wants his wife to call in sick for him at work, because he knows if he got on the phone with
Captain Beatty he’d fold like a bad hand of cards and go to work anyway.
He asks her if she’d mind if he quit his job. There must be something special about books, he
argues, since the woman killed herself over them.
But Mildred is logical and fears hunger-stricken poverty.
Montag realizes that a book isn’t just an object, it’s a part of the person who wrote it.
Mildred is upset, but Guy counters that she hasn’t been really bothered by anything, not ever.
Just then Captain Beatty pulls up outside. Once in the house, he orders Mildred to shut the TV up.
Left with Guy, he explains that he’s seen this all before, that every fireman goes through this.
The rule book lies, he said – their job hasn’t existed as long as it claims. It came into being later,
after movies and radio took people away from books. Everything got shorter, faster.
While he’s lecturing to Guy, who is still in bed, Mildred starts fixing up the room, fluffing the
pillows, etc. She finds the book behind his pillow but Guy cuts her off and yells at her to leave
before she’s able to draw Beatty’s attention to it.
Beatty has moved on to the topic of sports, which allow for the organization and therefore
subjugation of the country’s citizens.
The biggest problem with books, Beatty explains, is that everyone is so obsessed with political
correctness and not offending any minorities that the materials were over-censored. At the end of
the day, all that was allowed to remain was comic books and porn. “Intellectual” became a swear
word, because everyone has to be equal, no one smarty-pants allowed to rise above the rest.
So these men were persecuted, and their books burned.
At the core, people want to be happy. And since everyone is a minority of something (whether
race, sexual orientation, or occupation), everyone was offended by something. Which means all
books are offensive, and all books should be burned.
Montag asks how it is possible that someone like Clarisse exists. The odd duck happens now and
then, says Beatty, which is why they try to take the children off to school at the earliest possible
age – to indoctrinate them, to stamp out individuality.
People like Clarisse are better off dead, he concludes.
In school, they stuff the children full of facts, but eliminate the possibility of argument or
disagreement. If they can’t disagree, they can’t possibly be unhappy. And happiness is the point
of living.
Books, says Beatty, don’t say anything. They are fiction, philosophy, argument, but nothing
tangible or real. They make you feel lost.
Montag asks what happens if a fireman accidentally takes a book home. Beatty responds that the
fireman can keep it for a day, but that then they will come to burn it. Beatty stands to leave,
asking if Montag will come to work tonight.
Though sure that he will never come to work again, Montag says “Maybe.”
Beatty drives away in his car (a beetle) and Montag, looking out at the street, remembers Clarisse
talking about how people used to have front porches, before sitting and talking and thinking was
looked down upon.
Fahrenheit 451
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Montag continues to think aloud regarding his personal crisis. He wants to smash things, he’s
unhappy, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever work again – he might even start reading books. He wants
to do something big, but he doesn’t know what.
He tells his wife he wants to show her something – something behind the ventilator grill.
The something turns out to be an entire collection of books that Guy has squirreled away, one at a
time, over the last year.
He tells Mildred that they’re in this together now; Mildred responds by shrieking and taking one
of the books to the kitchen incinerator.
Guy stops her and pleads desperately with his wife. He wants to read the books just once, to see
what’s in them. If there’s nothing there, he’ll burn them. But people like Clarisse made him
curious, and he wants to know why men like Beatty are afraid of her.
The front door’s electronic voice notifies Mrs. Montag that someone is at the front door. She’s
afraid it’s Beatty again, but Montag insists they ignore the visitor and start reading the books. He
opens one and, after a dozen pages, comes to this line: “It is computed that eleven thousand
persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller
end.” (FYI: This is from Gulliver’s Travels.)
Mildred doesn’t know what this means, and concludes that it means nothing – that Beatty was
right.
Montag says they should start over, at the beginning.
Part II: The Sieve and the Sand
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The Montags read all afternoon. He is caught by one passage in particular, from an 18th century
British writer named Samuel Johnson: "We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is
formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a
series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over."
He listens to the rain outside and wonders if that applies to Clarisse. All these books point to her,
he thinks.
Mildred has found a line she identifies with, from British biographer James Boswell: “That
favourite subject, Myself.”
There is scratching at the front door; it’s the Mechanical Hound.
Mildred rails against books because they aren’t people. Her TV shows, now those have people,
she says.
Suddenly, Mildred gets nervous and upset at the prospect of Beatty coming back, finding the
books, and burning them. WHY should they do this, she asks?
Montag flips out in return. He starts talking about the machines that pumped her stomach after her
suicide attempt, and Clarisse’s disappearance. They hear the sound of jet bombers going by
overhead and he rants a bit about the two atomic wars their country has started since 1990. Maybe
the books can help with our ignorance, he says.
The phone rings and Mildred blabs on the phone with one of her friends about the TV shows for
the day. Meanwhile, Guy wonders where he can find someone to teach him what he knows about
books. His thoughts run to an old man in a black coat whom he once saw in a park, hiding
something in his coat.
The man’s name was Faber and he was a retired English professor. He spoke in cadence, and
Montag suspected he had a book of poetry hidden in his coat. When Montag revealed he was a
fireman, Faber handed him a slip of paper with his address on it, in case Montag decided to turn
him in.
Fahrenheit 451
Summary Notes
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Montag opens up his file of “Future Investigations” and indeed finds Faber’s name in there. With
it is Faber’s phone number, which he dials.
Over the phone, Montag asks how many copies of the Bible are left. Faber is wary of a trap and
refuses to say much on the phone; he only repeats that there aren’t any and hangs up.
Back in the hallway with Mildred, Montag shows her a copy of the Bible and explains that it may
be the last copy in the world. She doesn’t care.
He imagines what Beatty would say, that burning a book is beautiful, that all the false promises
were being destroyed when they did their jobs.
Montag leaves, explaining to his wife that he has to have a copy of the Bible made before the
books are burned. She wants to know if he’ll be back in time for a TV show that night.
He stops and asks Mildred if her “family” on the TV loves her. It’s a silly question, she says, and
doesn’t answer. Montag leaves.
On the subway, Guy feels numb. He feels as though someone has stolen his smiling veneer. He
remembers trying to fill a sieve with sand on the beach as a child, and feels as though the same
thing is happening now as he reads the Bible and tries to memorize its passages.
While he reads, an advertisement for toothpaste distracts him, making it impossible to remember
any of the Bible.
He gets off the subway and knocks on Faber’s door. Faber is paranoid but, after a brief bout of
protest, opens the door to Guy.
Faber is amazed at the Bible and calls Montag brave, but Montag refuses the label, insisting that
Faber is the only one who can help him.
Faber handles the Bible and remarks that these days, Christ has been made into another figure on
the TV. He also misses the smell of old books. He condemns himself for being a coward, for not
stopping the book-burning when it all started.
Montag declares that he can’t talk to anyone and needs Faber to teach him to understand what
he’s reading.
Faber insists that what Montag is looking for isn’t books; books are just a receptacle for
knowledge. Montag is missing three important pieces of information, he says. One, books are so
feared because they record life. Two, people need to have leisure time – not time for sports or
recreation, but time to think. Three, we need the right to use what we learn from the first two to
change the way we act.
Guy is all fired up and wants to steal books and print copies of them in cahoots with Faber. But
Faber is more skeptical and realistic. The only way he’d participate in any such rebellious
behavior is if the fireman structure itself were destroyed.
Books are there, says Faber, to remind us that we are fools. Everything he needs to know is in the
world around them, but it is books that illuminate that wisdom.
He jokingly suggests that they plant books in all the fireman’s houses, so that they will burn
themselves up. Montag takes him seriously and thinks this is a swell plan.
He asks if there are others that are like Faber. Yes, Faber answers, lots of professors and actors
who are no longer allowed to think or read.
But he reminds Montag that it won’t be easy; firemen aren’t that necessary since no one wants to
read anymore anyway. They’re having fun without books.
Before he is sent away, Guy offers Faber the Bible, which he would gladly accept. But then
Montag starts tearing up the pages. He stops only when Faber agrees to teach him.
Faber asks Montag if he has money; he does, a few hundred dollars. Faber reports that he knows
an unemployed ex-printer…
Then Guy’s thoughts turn to Beatty who, despite being the Fire Captain, seems to know a good
amount of literature by heart. He asks if Faber can offer any help in dealing with him.
Fahrenheit 451
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Faber then leads Guy to a back room of his house and hands him a small object that looks like the
Seashell transmitter Mildred wears to bed. When Guy puts it in his ear, he can hear Faber’s voice
through it. It’s referred to as a “green bullet.”
Faber considers himself a coward for speaking only through the two-way radio instead of taking
action himself. He says good night and commits to speaking to his ex-printer friend.
Montag walks back home and feels the impending war in the sky above him. He hears reports of
the war over the radio, but through his ear, Faber reports that the news is wrong: they say a
million men have been mobilized, but it’s actually ten million.
Montag is concerned that, with Faber literally inside his head and all, he won’t be able to think
for himself anymore. Faber comments that this is a wise observation on his part. He also offers to
read Montag to sleep every night.
That night at home, Mildred is entertaining friends – Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles. The women
are, of course, engaged in some sort of TV-related activity in the parlour room. Montag is
irritated, but Faber’s voice whispers for him to have patience.
Mrs. Phelps discusses the quick, forty-eight hour war in progress – that’s where her husband is at
the moment. She’s not worried, though, since it’s always somebody else’s husband that dies. Plus,
she and her husband have an agreement to not cry and get married again right away should one of
them kick the bucket.
Looking at these women, Montag is reminded of having entered a church as a child and
encountered statues of saints which he couldn’t understand.
He feels the need to make conversation and asks Mrs. Phelps about her children. She doesn’t have
any, she says – no one in his right mind would.
Mrs. Bowles disagrees. She has children, but they’re away at school nine days out of ten, so
fortunately she doesn’t have to see them too often.
As they discuss the most recent election, it becomes clear that it was fixed. One of the candidates
was called Mr. Noble and was incredibly attractive. The other was small and ugly and belonged to
a political party called “the Outs.”
Distraught, Montag runs out of the room and comes back with a book of poetry. He also starts
ranting to Faber about how monstrous these women are, which makes him look just a wee bit out
of it.
Faber pleads with him to stop, but Mrs. Phelps says sure, why not hear some poetry?
Mildred, desperate to cover up the situation, explains that every fireman is allowed to bring home
one book, simply to prove that books should be burned.
Whatever. Montag clears his throat and begins reading Dover Beach.
Several lines later, Mrs. Phelps starts crying. They ask her what’s wrong, but she doesn’t know.
Mrs. Bowles takes the opportunity to yell at Montag. This, she says, proves that books are bad.
She calls Montag “nasty” and asks why he wants to hurt other people this way.
Again, Mildred tries to patch things up by suggesting that they watch TV, but Mrs. Bowles is
already on her way out the door. Montag yells at her to go, adding insult to, well, insult by
mentioning all the abortions she’s had and the children who hate her.
Faber, meanwhile, is still calling Montag a fool through the earpiece, which Guy rips out and
stuffs in his pocket.
Guy finds the rest of his book stash, which has diminished: Mildred has begun scattering them
throughout the house. In the meantime, he hides what’s left in the bushes behind his house.
As Montag walks back through his house, Mildred is nowhere to be seen. He takes solace in the
fact of Faber’s new place in his life – he feels he will learn from this man, leave behind the old
Montag, and become someone newer, wiser.
Fahrenheit 451
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Indeed, Faber comforts him over the earpiece. He tells Montag to be patient, that he can’t expect
to change the opinions of women like Mrs. Phelps. He warns Guy not to do anything rash around
Beatty, but to let Faber feel out the situation over the earpiece.
On his way to the firehouse, though, Montag panics. He can’t move his feet, he says. But with
Faber’s coaxing he is able to continue into the firehouse.
When Montag enters, the hound is not in its kennel and the men are, as usual, playing cards with
Beatty.
Guy takes a seat and joins the game, but feels as though his hands are guilty of crimes. He tries to
leave them under the table, but Beatty commands that he show his hand (they’re playing cards
after all).
Then Beatty starts quoting literary passages at Montag. His quotations are contradictory, and
often from the same author. He continues, trying to confuse Guy and prove that literature is
complicated and destructively confusing.
Faber warns Montag not to rise to the challenge, to stay quiet. Montag seems to be having a silent
panic attack – Beatty even grabs his wrist and is awed by his racing pulse.
Beatty continues, claiming that books are traitors. For every time they help you build your case,
make your argument, they simultaneously cut you down, prove you wrong.
When he’s done, Faber whispers that Montag must later listen to his side of things, and decide for
himself with whom he agrees – the Captain or Faber.
The alarm bell rings. Beatty says that it is a “special case” as they head out down the pole.
On the way, Montag reflects on his trying to convert Mildred’s friends. It seems so silly to him
now, like trying to put out a fire with water pistols, he thinks.
Beatty drives tonight, which he has never done before. (Uh-oh.)
He declares they’re going to keep the world happy, and Montag wonders if he can ever burn
anything again, given all that he’s learned in the last day.
Then they arrive at Montag’s house.
Oh.