Fahrenheit 451: Question 2

This book is filled with many different, little conflicts that ultimately lead up to both gains and losses for Guy Montag.

The initial conflict was when Clarisse McClellan, the new next door neighbor, and Guy meet. She seems to be very strange, very different from most other people. She likes to just take walks, think about things, and walk in the rain. She says that she does not go to school much, but they do not notice or really care all that much that she is gone, mostly because she does not care that much for the kind of activities that the other kids do. Her reasoning is “An hour of T.V. class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, 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. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball” (Bradbury 29-30). I think that this shows how the times have changed in this future world. From meeting Clarisse, he says she took his happiness that “he wore like a mask” and that she “ had run off across the lawn with the mask and there was no way of going to knock on the door and ask for it back” (Bradbury 12).

He ends up losing his house and wife after several people turn in an “alarm” that he has books in his house. He also loses his job because of this, and also because he burned his Chief alive and ran into the city.

What he ends up gaining in the end though, is a new family of people who welcome him as a brother because he knows the book of Ecclesiastes. He has gained a new home with the people who are keeping the candle of knowledge burning.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Print.