Nor did Montag know that people could actually talk to one another the governmental use of parlor walls has eliminated the need for casual conversation. For example, Montag never knew that firemen used to fight actual fires or that billboards used to be only 20 feet long. At the same time, she also gives the reader the opportunity to see that the government has dramatically changed what its citizens perceive as their history. Clarisse gives Montag enlightenment she questions him not only about his own personal happiness but also about his occupation and about the fact that he knows little truth about history. When Montag meets Clarisse McClellan, his new vivacious teenage neighbor, he begins to question whether he really is happy. However, the reader quickly notices that everything isn't as Montag wants it to be. When he views himself in the firehouse mirror after a night of burning, he grins 'the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.' At first, Montag believes that he is happy. When books and new ideas are available to people, conflict and unhappiness occur. Without ideas, everyone conforms, and as a result, everyone should be happy. Therefore, Montag, along with the other firemen, burn the books to show conformity. Books are not to be read they are to be destroyed without question.įor Montag, 'It was a pleasure to burn.' The state mandated that all books must burn. As a fireman, Guy Montag is responsible for destroying not only the books he finds, but also the homes in which he finds them.

However, firemen have been given a new occupation they are burners of books and the official censors of the state. In this dystopian (dreadful and oppressive) setting, people race 'jet cars' down the roads as a way of terminating stress, 'parlor walls' are large screens in every home used dually for entertainment and governmental propaganda, and houses have been fireproofed, thus making the job of firemen, as they are commonly known, obsolete. In the first part of Fahrenheit 451, the character Guy Montag, a thirty-year-old fireman in the twenty-fourth century (remember that the novel was written in the early 1950s) is introduced.

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