An introductory plot summary, key themes, technology and history of Fahrenheit 451.

1. Plot
Summary

2. Guy Montag is a Fireman who
believes he is content in his job,
which consists of burning
books and the possessions of
book owners.
Clarisse McClellan, a
teenage girl and his
new neighbour,
challenges Montag’s
view of happiness.
Mildred, Montag’s wife,
spends her days
engrossed in the three
full walls of interactive
TV (“the family”).
Back at the Firestation station,
Montag is threatened by the
Mechanical Hound, a robotic
hunter that can be programmed
to track any scent.
Montag asks
Beatty if there
was a time when
Firemen
prevented fires,
instead of
starting them.
Montag is disturbed when an
elderly woman, whose
neighbour has turned her in,
refuses to leave her house as
they douse it with kerosene. She
lights a match herself and burns
along with the house.

3. Haunted by the vision of the
old woman's death, and by the
news of Clarisse's death,
Montag doesn't go to work the
next day.
Beatty visits him at home and delivers a long lecture on
the history of censorship, the development of mass
media, the dumbing down of culture, the rise of
instant gratification, and the role of Firemen as
society's "official censors, judges, and executors."
When Beatty leaves, Montag shows
Mildred twenty books, including a Bible,
that he's been hiding in the house. He feels
that their lives are falling apart and that the
world doesn't make sense, and hopes some
answers might be found in the books.
But reading is not easy when you
have so little practice. Montag,
however, remembers a retired
English professor named Faber
whom he met a year ago and who
might be able to help.

4. Faber is frightened of Montag
at first, but eventually agrees
to help Montag in a scheme to
undermine the Firemen. They
agree to communicate through
a tiny two-way radio placed in
Montag's ear.
Montag forces
Mildred’s friends to
listen to him read a
poem by Matthew
Arnold from one of
his secret books. They
leave, greatly upset.
Montag hands over a book
to Beatty and is apparently
forgiven. Suddenly, an
alarm comes in. The
Firemen rush to their truck
and head out to the address
given. It's Montag's house.
Mildred is the one who called in the alarm.
Beatty forces Montag to burn his house with
a Flamethrower, and then tells him he's under
arrest. Beatty also discovers the two-way radio
and says he'll trace it to its source, then taunts
Montag until Montag kills him with the
Flamethrower.
Now a fugitive and the object of a
massive, televised manhunt, Montag visits
Faber, then makes it to the river a few
steps ahead of the Mechanical Hound.

5. Along some abandoned
railroad tracks in the
countryside, Montag finds a
group of old men whom
Faber told him about—
outcasts from society who
were formerly academics and
theologians. They and others
like them have memorized
thousands of books and are
surviving on the margins of
society, waiting for a time
when the world becomes
interested in reading again.
Early the next
morning, enemy
bombers fly overhead
toward the city. The
war begins and ends
almost in an instant.
The city is reduced to
powder.
Montag mourns for
Mildred and their empty
life together. With Montag
leading, the group of men
head upriver toward the
city to help the survivors
rebuild amid the ashes.

6. Key
Themes

7. Censorship
~ stopping the transmission or publication of matter considered objectionable.
Censorship is not imposed from above, but has arisen from below. Intellectualism and
anything that disrupts peoples’ enjoyment (by making them question, think, disagree,
etc.) has been banned as a result. No one wants to upset anyone, especially ‘minorities’,
and thus anything contentious or thought-provoking has been banned. Ultimately, this
power is then given to the government to enforce on behalf of the public.
Mass media becomes a tool for censorship: television is designed to avoid provoking
ideas (it is, quite literally, ‘mindless’ entertainment).

8. Censorship
"Bigger the population, the more
minorities…The bigger your market,
Montag, the less you handle
controversy, remember that!... Authors,
full of evil thoughts, lock up your
typewriters. They did."
"It's not books you need, it's some of
the things that once were it
books....The same infinite detail and
awareness could be projected through
radios and televisors, but are not."
"Burn all, burn
everything. Fire is
bright and fire is
clean."
It was a
pleasure to
burn.

9. Apathy
~ lack of interest in or concern for things, particularly those things that which is considered
important.
Citizen are unconcern about death and war, people are absorbed in their own lives and
are not concerned about other people. They are generally apathetic towards life and
death, lack any strong connections with others and are emotionless even when dealing
with people in danger. Again, mass media is a key force behind this aspect of society.
People are too absorbed in their own lives to care about others, including their family.
As a result, their own lives become meaningless.

10. Apathy
"We are living in a time
when flowers are trying
to live on flowers, instead
of growing on good rain
and black loam."
"We have everything we need to be
happy, but we aren't happy. Something's
missing. I looked around. The only
thing I positively knew was gone was
the books I'd burned in ten or twelve
years. So I thought books might help."
"Those who don't build
must burn. It's as old as
history and juvenile
delinquents."
"They are so confident that they
will run on forever. But they won't
run on. They don't know that this
is all one huge big blazing meteor
that makes a pretty fire in space,
but that someday it'll have to hit."

11. Conformity
~ compliance in actions and behaviour with certain accepted social norms.
The society is built around conformity – acting the same as everyone else. People do
not seek to be ‘better’ at anything than anyone else. Stripped of knowledge and
interest, no one is a threat to anyone else.
Education is aimed at making everyone the same: to not question or think, and to
instead just wait to be ‘filled’ with facts. Entertainment and mass media is aimed at
preventing people from thinking and instead follow instructions.
Self improvement is intensely discouraged by both the government and society.
Anything other than the norm is ‘antisocial’.

12. Conformity
"We never ask questions, or at least
most don't; they just run the answers
at you, bing bing bing, and us sitting
there for four more hours of film
teacher"
"I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix.
It's so strange. I'm very social indeed.
It all depends on what you mean by
social, doesn't it? Social to me means
talking to you about things like this."
"The important thing for you to remember,
Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys... We stand
against the small tide of those who want to make
everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and
thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold
steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and
drear philosophy drown our world."
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and
equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made
equal. Each man the image of every other; then all
are happy, for there are no mountains to make
them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A
book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn
it. Take the shot from the weapon."

13. Ignorance
~ lacking both knowledge and the desire to acquire it.
There is tremendous tension between the ideas of knowledge and ignorance. Montag’s
society is structured around the destruction of knowledge and the promotion of
ignorance in order to achieve ‘sameness’ amongst all people. If everyone is the same,
no one is better, and then everyone can be happy. As a result, free thought and the
sharing of ideas has been abandoned by the vast majority of society, and a self-
destructive pursuit of ‘happiness’ has taken its place.
The quest for knowledge and the asking of questions destroys ignorance. Ignorance is
ultimately destructive, while the proponents of knowledge are able to learn from the
past and keep moving forward.

14. Ignorance
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick... Uh! Bang! Smack!
Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-
digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a
headline!... Whirl man's mind around about so fast
under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters,
broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all
unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"
"the televisor is real. It is immediate,
it has dimension. It tells you what to
think and blast it in. It must be right.
It seems so right. It rushes you so
quickly to its own conclusion your
mind hasn't time to protest“
"Cramp them full of non-combustible
data, chock them so damn full of facts
they feel stuffed, but absolutely
brilliant with information."
"You're not like the others. I've seen a
few; I know. When I talk, you look at
me. When I said something about the
moon, you looked at the moon, last
night. The others would never do
that."

15. Technology

16. "But who has ever torn himself from the
claw that encloses you when you drop a seed
in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it
wishes! It is an environment as real as the
world. It becomes and is the truth. … I have
never been able to argue with a one-hundred-
piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three
dimensions, and I being in and part of those
incredible parlours."
“The mechanical
hound slept but did
not sleep, lived but did
not live in its gently
humming, gently
vibrating, softly
illuminated kennel
back in a dark corner
of the firehouse.”
“Did it drink of the
darkness? Did is suck out
all the poisons accumulated
with the years? It fed in
silence … The impersonal
operator of the machine
could…gaze into the soul
of the person whom he
was pumping out.
Pages 22 - 27 Pages 59 - 68 Pages 35 - 39

17. History

18. Captain Beatty provides a
detailed, explicit account of
the demise of books and the
danger that they pose to
society.
PAGES 71-81
Read this passage carefully.
Annotate it in your books.
Make notes in your exercise book on the
following. Include BRIEF quotes within
your answers where possible.
1. What led to books becoming
banned?
2. What is the world like as a result of
no books?
3. How has the world changed as a
result of this?
4. Why did people become afraid of
books?
5. How are books now viewed
6. What is valued most in this world?