Fahrenheit 451: Question 7: Part 2- Water & The Phoenix

Even though fire was an important symbol in Fahrenheit 451, there were also plenty of other symbols too.

One major symbol throughout the book is water. It’s not very surprising, seeing as the other major theme is fire. It’s good to have a little balance when it comes to nature and humans. It starts out when Clarisse talks about the dew in the morning grass, and how Guy does not seem to recall if he knew that. It also comes out when Clarisse leaves him in the rain and he looks up at the sky and tries to catch raindrops in his mouth, which is an unusual thing for a person whose life it is to burn things. One way that it shows again is when Faber turns his sprinklers on to throw off the scent of Montag so the Mechanical Hound that was after him would lose the scent trail and give Guy a little bit more time to get as far away as possible. The biggest way that water shows that it is a major symbol is when Guy jumps in the river to escape the Mechanical Hound and the police helicopters. He ducked under the water, so it provided a safe haven for him to hide where the different technologies of the police could not get him. Another ironic thing that happened was that throughout the book, it talked about how he felt like he was drowning, but when he was in the water hiding from the Mechanical Hound, he felt he was “floating in a sudden peacefulness” (Bradbury 140).

Another important theme that came up at the end of the book would be the phoenix. The phoenix was an ancient mythical bird that would build a pyre every so often and burn itself, and then rise out of the ashes of the fire, a new body but the same spirit of the original bird. Granger compares it to the city that was just bombed. He said “it must be first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation” (Bradbury 163).

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